Ethiopia’s government seeks to sell 40% of its stake in state-owned Ethio-Telecom.
The Ethiopian Ministry of Finance touted Ethio-Telecom’s near monopoly of Ethiopia’s The Ministry of Finance says the Company’s robust infrastructure coupled with its strong financial performance will offer significant competitive advantage to any investor.
Ethiopia is looking for investors who can add value to the Company by bringing in best practices in terms of operations, infrastructure management, and next-generation technological capabilities.

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Google has announced the introduction of Bard, the company’s experimental conversational AI service which is powered by the Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
Google has described Bard as a conversational AI service that combines the depth of the world’s information with the power, intelligence, and creativity of its large language models to help deliver answers to inquiries. Similar to ChapGPT, Bard uses online information to give new, high-quality responses.
CEO Pichai underlined that AI has been a focus for the company in the last six years. From presenting Transformers, the grandmother of contemporary languages, in 2017 to introduce the state-of-the-art big language model, LaMDA, in 2021, Google has continued to put AI at the core of its efforts.

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SoftBank Group’s investment vehicles posted a loss of nearly $6 billion in the quarter that ended in December as the Japanese tech investor continues to bleed through the market downturn and significantly pares back new backings.
This is the fourth consecutive quarter in which SoftBank Group has lost money, prompting many to challenge the fundamental thesis of the giant, which has deployed more capital in the tech markets globally than anyone else in the past decade.
SoftBank says it lost $5.8 billion across Vision funds and Latin America fund in the quarter. While a $5.8 billion loss is nothing to write home about, SoftBank will take comfort in the fact that it lost $10 billion in the previous quarter.
The company says the fair value of its current late-stage portfolio is over $37 billion.

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India is moving to block 232 apps, some with links to China, that offer betting and loan services in the South Asian market to prevent misuse of the citizens’ data.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is in the process to enforce an emergency order to ban 138 betting and gambling apps and another 94 that provided unauthorized loan services in the interest of protecting the country’s integrity.
The Ministry of Home Affairs, Prasar Bharati added that the apps sought to mislead customers into taking big debts without realizing the terms and there were concerns that they could be used as tools for espionage and propaganda.

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Gokada, one of Nigeria’s most prominent last-mile delivery companies, reportedly considered selling the business to a competitor, Kwik Logistics, in 2022.
Ultimately, the deal did not go through and it is unclear why those talks broke down. Gokada recently set its valuation at $10 million as it tried to raise $100,000 through crowdfunding.
Gokada recently laid off at least 20 employees in November 2022 before laying off 54 more people this week
Tosin Oni, Gokada’s CEO, said the layoffs were in response to harsh macroeconomic conditions. He said that as an unprofitable startup with negative cash flow, the priority for them at the moment is increasing efficiency.

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Ceviant, a UK-based financial technology company delivering treasury and trade solutions to corporates, has received its Payment Solution Service Provider License from the Central Bank of Nigeria.
The license permits Ceviant to offer a range of payment services to clients in Nigeria, including electronic fund transfers and payment processing.
This license presents further opportunities to partner with banks and other financial institutions within the payments ecosystem, including API integrations with banks, enabling businesses to manage bank accounts, payments, transactions, cash balances, and more, all through a single portal and API.
Kehinde Dabiri, CEO of Ceviant, says they are proud to have been granted the PSSP license from the Central Bank of Nigeria.

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Kenya has dropped its charges of financial impropriety against Flutterwave. The court case began in July 2022, when Flutterwave was charged in court on suspicions of card fraud and money laundering. Kenya’s Assets Recovery Agency says 1st Respondent’s (Flutterwave) bank accounts received billions in a suspected scheme of money laundering and the same was deposited in different bank accounts in an attempt to conceal or disguise the nature, source, location, disposition or movement of the said funds.”

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Eazy Digital wants to give small insurance companies in Southeast Asia the same advantage as their larger competitors. Its SaaS platform lets insurers digitize many parts of their operations, enabling them to scale up more efficiently.
The Bangkok-based startup announced it has raised $850,000 in an oversubscribed seed round led by Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Wing Vasiksiri and Sasin Bangkok Venture Club.
Eazy Digital co-founder, Haprem Doowa says that while working together at Frank, he and Sukul both realized that the insurance industry was plagued with manual work and quick home-built solutions.

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China’s smartphone market is hitting a speed bump as COVID-19 roils the world’s second-largest economy.
The country’s smartphone shipments dropped 14% year-over-year in 2022, reaching a ten-year low. It was also the first time that China’s handset sales had slid below 300 million units in ten years, according to Canalys.
The three-year-long stringent “zero-COVID” policy that disrupted businesses and dampened consumer confidence, coupled with macroeconomic headwinds, spelled an end to China’s years of double-digit growth.


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PhonePe recorded a revenue of $234.3 million in the first nine months of 2022, the most valuable Indian fintech startup has disclosed in a filing.
The nine-month financials marks a jump from the $201.6 million revenue that the Bengaluru-headquartered generated in the 12-month period ending in financial year March last year.
PhonePe, which is valued at $12 billion, has projected a revenue of $325 million in the calendar year 2022 and $504 million in 2023.
The startup, backed by Walmart, doesn’t expect to turn EBIDTA positive, a key profitability metric, until the calendar year 2025, KMPG wrote in its valuation report.

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