\nUniversity Education<\/td>\n | Pace University<\/td>\n | New York, United States<\/td>\n | Graduated with a degree in Business Administration<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nMike Made his First Million at the Age of 26<\/strong><\/h2>\nMike Adenga is said to have cut his teeth in business selling lace cloth and soft drinks, through which he made his first million at the age of 26.\u00a0For someone with such early business experience plus great academic excellence, Mike Adenuga’s rise to financial success wasn’t much of a surprise to those who were closer to him. Having so much interest in business, Mike hastily returned home after his studies to take over his mother’s sawmill business. While handling what appeared to be his family business, he did other side businesses like selling lace materials and distributing soft drinks to add to his income.<\/p>\n You will find it amazing to learn that Mike Adenuga had a humble beginning, hawking animal feed in the streets of Ibadan to being one of the richest men not just in Yoruba land or Nigeria but in the continent of Africa. In 1990, 37-year-old Mike received a drilling license. The following year, his Consolidated Oil Nigeria Limited headed for the shallow waters of the Southwestern State of Ondo State, making it the first indigenous oil company to do so in commercial quantity at the time. Consolidated Oil Nigeria Limited later changed its name to what is now widely known as Conoil Producing Plc.<\/p>\n Mike’s oil exploration outfit, Conoil Producing, operates six oil blocks in the Niger Delta. The company, which has its headquarters at the Mike Adenuga Towers in Victoria Island, Lagos, is known for extracting, producing, selling crude oil, and supplying a range of lubricants and household and liquefied petroleum gas for use by the domestic and industrial sectors. Its range of lubricants includes transport lubricants, industrial lubricants, greases, process oil, and bitumen. Conoil also supplies what is referred to as White products: premium motor spirits, aviation turbine kerosene, dual-purpose kerosene, low-pour fuel oil, and automotive gasoline\/grease oil.<\/p>\n How He Joined the Telecommunication Industry<\/strong><\/h2>\nIn 1999, Adenuga went for a GSM license when telecommunication was just being introduced into the country, and he got a conditional license that was revoked. In 2003, he received a second one when the government held an auction again.\u00a0His telecom company, Globacom, began spreading so quickly and even began challenging the largest network providers then –\u00a0 MTN Group, which, at the time, was one of the two GSM companies that first debuted in Nigeria’s market, creating almost a duopoly.<\/p>\n The emergence of Glo\u2014being the first indigenous GSM company, revolutionized the telecommunications industry for the good of ordinary Nigerians, and today, it is a network company to be reckoned with not just in Nigeria but also in a few other countries across Africa, with more licenses currently being prospected in other West African countries.<\/p>\n Some of the best moves that distinguished the company among its peer at the time of its introduction in 2003 were its introduction of cheaper SIM cards to Nigerians who were initially buying one sim as high as N50,000 and its introduction of the per-second billing in voice calls that has today become the model for all telecoms industry players in Nigeria. Before the introduction of the latter,\u00a0 Nigerians were charged N50 per minute, and they could only buy N1500 recharge cards\u2014that had a 14-day lifeline. At the end of two weeks, if you could not finish the airtime, whatever airtime left would be frozen until you renew your line.<\/p>\n Chief Adenuga-led Globalcom made all these cheaper and very much affordable for an ordinary citizen.\u00a0The company offers international and voice calling, SMS, high-speed internet, ADSL for homes, fixed landline services, and other telecoms solutions. Now regarded as the third largest telecommunications business in Nigeria with about 55 million subscribers (according to Forbes). As of this writing, Glo serves customers in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Benin Republic, and Ghana.<\/p>\n In 2011, Glo became the first telecom company to build an $800m high-capacity submarine fibre optics cable known as Glo 1 that successfully connected Nigeria to Europe. In 2015, Adenuga made a takeover bid to purchase Ivorian mobile telecom operator Comium C\u00f4te d’Ivoire for $600 million.<\/p>\n |