Austin Kwesi Okere, CEO of Computer Warehouse Group (CWG) began his love affair with entrepreneurship purely by accident. Armed with a Bachelor’s Degree and little experience, he started CWG, though on humble beginnings, but with a dream and desire to see the company becoming a global company in the near future.
When Austin ventured into the barren IT world back in 1992 at an era when, most people would not dare, owing largely to the associated risks, he was taking a giant step in his life that would ultimately impact on businesses.
Today his company has a presence in three African countries whilst indirectly serving seventeen others. With an annual turnover of a hundred and twenty million US dollars (US$ 120 million), a 550-man workforce, and a vision to be the number one IT Utility Company in Africa by the year 2015, Computer Warehouse Group (CWG) Ltd. sits comfortably among the success stories in the IT world. Not that CWG’s story is an over-achievement, but it is an African story conceived in Africa with African players and setting, and that makes it special. The dream was nurtured and executed right on the shores of Africa by a man whose only motivation is a “desire to achieve excellence”.
The Man behind the dream- Austin KwesiOkere
Back in his school days at St. Augustine’s College, Cape Coast, University of Ghana and then University of Lagos, never did it occur to Austin that he would one day be an entrepreneur. As he would want to put it “it happened by accident.” He branched into Computer Science after realizing that his interest lay not in the Agricultural Science course he was pursuing at Legon back in 1982.
Combining the best of two cultures
Charting a course up the ladder of success has not been easy with all the challenges, faced by this Ghanaian–Nigerian business mogul who, imbued with the humility of his mother(a Ghanaian) and the aggressiveness of his father(a Nigerian), has managed to beat all odds to survive in a turf mostly seen as the preserve of Western companies. The gamble with his time and resource has paid off, because not only has CWG,Austin’s baby, become as he says of it “a Pan-African IT Company”, but the company which started as a retailer of Computers is now a provider of integrated ICT solutions tailor-made for small-to-medium and large enterprises as well as governments.
Shaping the Dream
Starting as a hardware supply and support company representing DELL Computers, CWG has grown significantly since its establishment in 1993.Urged on by customers, the group entered into the provision and installation of software for its clients. But as difficult as it was, things did not pick up until 2000, at the turn of the millennium, when the threat of the ‘Y2K scare’ pushed companies to search for avenues to back up their data, INFOSYS with its banking software called Finacle agreed to come on board to partner CWG in the provision of solutions for banks.
CWG: Services and Partners
Crafted around the Pan-African dream, CWG’s vision is to create a presence in ten African countries and indirectly serve thirty others by 2015.Whilst building its dream of becoming the number one IT Utility Company, CWG hopes to create an avenue where computing power is used on a pay-per-use basis by the year in question.
Using the Finacle application, the company has provided services and support for over one-third of all ATMs in Nigeria. Some banks in Ghana and Uganda have also joined the trail.CWG’s ability to sustain itself in this rough business terrain has partly been made possible by its strategic partnership formed with companies like CISCO, DELL, HP, Infosys, Oracle and other well-established blue chip companies.CWG is the Sun Executive Partner, Dell Global Enterprise Program, Microsoft Gold Partner, and a host of other partnerships.
Challenges of doing business in Africa
Dealing with the challenges of the industry has not been easy for CWG especially as it has to contend with such problems as trade barriers, lack of skilled /good human resource, capital, different law regimes and top of it, indifference to its services for the simple fact that it is an African company. As Austin says “it has been difficult moving out” but the company has navigated around some of these challenges by for instance establishing a technology institute to train its workforce and raising financial resources for expansion through equity finance.
Taking the short-cut route to the top has been deemed the surest way to survive by most people especially, the youth. Austin thinks otherwise and has one advice “patience pays, work your way to the top because there is no short-cut”. He says of Africa as “a frontier market with enough opportunities for those who dare to dream and turn their dreams into realities”, though he admits the myriad of challenges one has to contend with before hitting the top.
Austin’s entry into IT has been a launch pad to greater heights in his life. He is currently a member of “Frontier 100” a business think tank group of a sort made up of carefully selected CEOs of businesses across the developing world grossing over a hundred million dollars per annum.