BAKKACIMA BLOG

  Alibaba Group Holding, the  Chinese e-commerce giant   said orders made during its Single's Day mega-shopping festival had exceeded $56bn by Wednesday morning, as consumers sought to cash in on a deluge of discounts. Alibaba launched the annual online blitz early this year, with two primary discount periods taking place from November 1 through November 3 and again on November 11. The company will calculate gross merchandise volume - GMV over the full 11-day period, as opposed to the usual 24 hours. As of 12:30am local time (16:30 GMT) on November 11, the campaign’s GMV had surpassed 372.3 billion Chinese yuan ($56.3bn) with the order rate hitting a record peak of 583,000 per second, Alibaba said. Alibaba, Asia’s largest company, blew past last year’s record $38bn at the beginning of Singles’ Day. Homebound consumers turned grocery delivery into the industry’s hottest arena, anchoring an unprecedented surge in online activity during the nationwide lockdown. Domestic trav...

Access Bank/Access Diamond on Sunday said it will refund stamp duty deductions from accounts of its customers on Saturday. According to reports, the stamp duty deductions applied to all credits received into current and savings accounts in respect to electronic transfer and teller deposits of N10,000 and above. The money is remitted to the Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN), according to the bank. The collection of the fees took effect in February but the bank inadvertently delayed implementation until this week. Access Bank, said in an email it sent to customers on June 23 that it “will be required to process the accumulated charges” incurred between February 1, 2020 and April 30, 2020. Some customers, who took to social media to express their dissatisfaction, described the deductions as outrageous and unnecessary. “We have have heard our customers’ feedback that this charge is unwelcome, especially at this time against a challenging economic drop,” the bank said in a statement “We have con...

The Republic of South Korea has challenged Nigeria’s former Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in her bid to emerge as the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, WTO. South Korea yesterday threw a challenge to the bid of Nigeria’s economist who is seeking to replace Roberto Azvedez, who will be stepping down on 31 August 2020. The Asian country has nominated Ms Yoo Myung-Hee, who’s the country’s first female Trade Minister to run against Okonjo-Iweala. Myung-Hee has been a negotiator, strategist and pioneer in her 25-year career in the trade sector. She has played in the multilateral trade arena from the early days in 1995 when she took charge of WTO affairs in the Korea Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, through her role as Korea’s FTA strategist. Most recently, she served as negotiator of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the Korea-China FTA and the critical Korea-U.S. (KORUS) FTA renegotiations, among other trade initiatives. Recall that P...

Domestic flights scheduled to resume operations on the 21th of June has been put on hold. This was made  known by the Minister of Aviation Hadi Sirika during a briefing with the members of the presidential Covid-19 task force. He  explained that a new date would be fixed after a report is submitted by the Task Force for review next week. The minister, who was represented by the Director-General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Captain Musa Nuhu, said the ministry had developed and sent a circular to all stakeholders to develop a restart plan and submit to the regulatory body for review and approval depending on the business of the service providers. According to him, the restart plan is meant to cover airworthiness, operations, passenger licencing, aviation security, safety management system, consumer protection, and air transport regulation. “Currently, a lot of service providers have provided their restart plans and the plans are supposed to be revi...

In a post on the WhatsApp blog, the company has announced that digital payments for people and small businesses have just started. That is to say that  WhatsApp now has a new big feature, which is person-to-person payments. It’s just gone live in the past few hours, though only in one country right now: Brazil. Brazil for now is only the first step, obviously, and although no promises have been made of the feature making its way north to the U.S. or to other countries, it’s highly likely it will. This mirrors the way WhatsApp became so dominant in the first place - its multi-platform presence. Brilliant though the Messages app on iPhone is - and even though it’s probably about to see  a big upgrade announced by Apple in the coming days, its best experience is across Apple devices. Features such as invisible ink text, animated balloons and more are only visible on iPhone and iPad, for instance.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation -NNPC, on Wednesday, said that it has started the online sales and tracking of petroleum products across the country, to ensure minimal human interactions across its depots, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. In a statement in Abuja, Group General Manager, Information Technology Division (ITD) of the NNPC, Danladi Inuwa, disclosed  that the online sales and tracking of the commodity became possible due to its deployment of a sales and distribution application in the Oil and Gas Secondary Model Portal that would enable marketers buy petroleum products online.