Teleco Vodacom to settle South African inventor of ‘please call me’ functionality

The South African High Court in Pretoria has ordered telecom giant Vodacom to compensate Nkosana Makate, the inventor of the ‘please call me’ feature, a huge pay out for his work.

Makate is credited for creating the popular ‘please call me’ feature which allows customers to send up to five automated messages when they’re out of phone airtime. The feature works by dialing a USSD code, and it quite popular among African telecom.

Vodacom offered to pay Makate $3 million, but he refused and demanded a payment of $1.2 billion. He argued that the figure was 5% of the group’s $13.2 billion revenue over an 18-year period, claiming that the service contributed immensely to the telecom’s revenue.

The court has ordered Vodacom to upgrade the price from $3 million to a higher figure. As per the ruling, Makate “is entitled to be paid 5% of the total voice revenue generated from the PCM product” over the period it was created to date, that is from March 2001 – March 2021. This was according to the intellectual property agreement signed between both parties.

The former employee left Vodacom since 2004 over protracted legal issues with the company.

“I think with this solid judgement of Judge Hughes, it will be quite a mountain to climb for Vodacom. I had made a decision long time ago, when I was told that I’ll never get a cent out of this,” Makate said. “My resolve has not changed; I will see this thing to an end. I will make sure that I get what is due, and what is fair. And that I will pursue, until we get to the end of the road and that’s what I’m doing.”

For nearly 20 years, he has been in legal battle with the company for the service he invented in 2001. Court filings show that the service was indeed a hit as the first day of operations “about 140,000 customers made use of the service.”

‘Please call me’ services are quite popular across the African telecommunications industry. Compared to ‘beep calls’ which allows customers to make flash calls with very low airtime, ‘please call me’ services were more promising in terms of revenue generation. Telecos hardly made any profits from beep calls, instead were left with more costs and congested networks.

The court ruling in favor of Makate after 18 years is a big win for intellectual property in Africa. It has been described by social media users as a “big win for inventors” and has stirred up discussions among African innovative communities about how their intellectual property can be protected when they pitch their ideas to bigger companies across the continent.