Why it is on record
Record held
Founders
Headquarters
Key dates
- 1986Omatek Computers Limited incorporated in Lagos by Florence Seriki.
- 2000sExpansion into PC cases, speakers, keyboards and mice — first such plant in sub-Saharan Africa.
- 2008Listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange as Omatek Ventures Plc.
- 2017Death of founder Florence Seriki at Lagos University Teaching Hospital, 3 March 2017.
Deep dive
Omatek is the institutional answer to the question of why, for a quarter-century after independence, no computer sold in Nigeria was made in Nigeria. Florence Seriki — a chemical-engineering graduate of the University of Ife (Obafemi Awolowo University) — incorporated Omatek Computers Limited in Lagos in 1986 and progressively built an assembly operation that by the early 2000s was producing not only branded desktops and notebooks but the casings, keyboards, mice and speakers that supplied other Nigerian and West African system-builders. This was the first integrated PC-hardware plant in sub-Saharan Africa; everything sold before it was imported as finished kit or as CKD from Asia.
The company was the leading beneficiary of the Obasanjo administration's domestic-content push in federal IT procurement in the early 2000s, and listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in 2008 — the first indigenous Nigerian ICT-hardware company to do so. It subsequently lost ground to the cheaper grey-market Chinese-assembled kit that flooded the market after 2010 and to the rise of Zinox (Leo Stan Ekeh) in the OEM-branded segment, but the historical record of first assembly is Omatek's. Florence Seriki — recipient of the MFR national honour and a fixture of the Nigerian ICT and women-in-business policy circuit — died on 3 March 2017.