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Nokia’s Nigerian Office Reopens After Brief License Spat

Nokia’s Nigerian Office Reopens After Brief License Spat

(Bloomberg) -- Nokia Oyj reopened its office in Nigeria after the local regulator said it halted the network manufacturer’s operations in the country over a 2 million naira ($6,150) sales and installations license.

“They had started the process about three weeks ago, but stopped somewhere,” Tony Ojobo, spokesman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, said Friday by phone from the capital, Abuja. The company is required to pay for the license, he said.

Nokia until some years ago supplied the vast majority of mobile phones in Africa’s most populated country and is seeking to partake in the expansion of faster mobile networks as Nigerians buy more smartphones. The Middle East and Africa contributed 9.4 percent to the Helsinki-based company’s sales last year, according to its annual report.

Nokia’s administrative office in Lagos has been reopened and the company received formal written confirmation about the matter, a spokesman for the company said in an e-mailed statement.

To contact the reporters on this story: David Malingha Doya in Abuja at dmalingha@bloomberg.net, Kasper Viita in London at kviita1@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rene Vollgraaff at rvollgraaff@bloomberg.net, Sophie Mongalvy, Andrew Rummer