By Florence Onuegbu
Lagos – An ICT expert, Mr Lanre Ajayi, said on Friday that people engaged in selling recharge cards would soon be driven out of business because of the adoption of e-commerce.
Ajayi, a former President of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos that the increasing adoption of e-commerce in Nigeria would put a lot of people out of business.
He said the expanding technology landscape was threatening some businesses, making it imperative for business operators to update their skills in line with the demands of modern technology.
According to him, people selling recharge cards need to update their knowledge in technology for them to keep pace with the times.
”Very soon, I can see recharge cards disappearing. And my advice is that we should not start campaigning that the recharge cards should be retained because of the people that sell them.
”People are logging to better things and I don’t think it is better to say because we want to keep people’s jobs, then we remain static for life.
“We have to move up. We should also move with technology, we should be more efficient.
”So the people selling recharge cards should have to adjust. They should go and acquire more skills for other things because physical selling of recharge cards won’t be necessary again,” he said.
Similarly, Mr Gbenga Adebayo, the Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria, told NAN that recharge card sellers needed to modernise their business.
Adebayo said that Nigerians were already considering other platforms through which they could recharge their devices.
He said that card seller should upgrade by also selling other electronic devices, rather than just selling recharge cards.
”They may not have the volume that they use to have in the beginning, when everybody was buying recharge cards, because today, there are alternative platforms that people use to recharge their lines.
”The volumes are going down. The profit margins are going down every day. This is the same for all of us operators. As they are feeling it, so also we are feeling it as industry players.”
The evolution of e-commerce has made telecommunications subscribers to recharge their lines using their phones or using automated teller machines and other platforms, including banks
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