Lanre Olaniyan, one of Nigeria’s telecom executives, has stepped down from his position as the Managing Director of Omnicom Solutions Limited after 14 years of managing the company’s affairs.
Confirming the news on Monday, May 16, 2022, Olaniyan explained that contrary to the usual expectation, he did not quit the company but only decided to step aside to focus on other interests.
“I am still part of the Omnicom team, and I only stepped aside as the MD. Knowing that I have given my best to Omnicom, I believe the stage is set for someone new to run the company and take it to greater heights while I sit on the board and give advisory support,” Olaniyan said.
Omnicom Solutions Limited is a full-service solutions company that offers a range of services for GSM, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS), Code-division multiple access (CDMA), and 3G networks.
On his next move after Omnicom, Olaniyan said, “I am involved in many projects and other ventures, and some of those ventures need attention. They need nurturing, just as I did for Omnicom. So those are what I will be dedicating my time to, moving on.”
Olaniyan’s decision to step aside had been reached for a while due to several reasons but was only made official in March 2022, describing the development as the latest good news from his over a 15-year career in the Nigerian telecom sector.
Read also: Why telecom market attracts low capital imports in recent years
Olaniyan led Omnicom Solutions from its startup years into a multibillion-naira company with several projects in Nigeria and across the West African subregion, as revealed during its 10th anniversary in 2018.
“In the sub-sector where we work, we are one of the biggest. Pre-Covid, we had more than 500 staff, and even during-covid, while everybody was downsizing, we were hiring more, and we never stopped working throughout the Covid-19 pandemic,” Olaniyan said.
Olaniyan says he is passionately working on a tech solution that will help the Nigerian economy retain the foreign exchange that many of its over 48 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) spend on retail software developed in other countries.
“We have created a solution that can help them do the same thing, better than those applications would do, and we are confident that business owners will find it as useful as we believe they will,” he added.
With a background in Electrical Engineering, Olaniyan is also an alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin, where he got a Postgraduate Degree in Data Science and Business Analytics.
