Ahabwe Collins

Could you turn your passion into a billion dollar business? That’s what Frank Wang did. As a child, Frank had a passion for flight: “At elementary school I saw my first model helicopter in a shop. It cost the equivalent of several months’ salary for average people. My family could not afford it. But finally, after I did a good job on my high-school finals, my parents rewarded me with a model helicopter. I assembled it but I wasn’t able to fly it properly because to do that needed months of practice. So when I did try to fly it, the helicopter immediately crashed.” Despite this early set-back Frank persisted. 10 years ago at 25 years old, he enrolled at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and began working on his project of designing a better remote controlled helicopter. His passion project became more important than his studies: “I spent three months intensively working on the project. At that time I was still enrolled at the university, but I skipped all ...

Today, Jack raised $4.5 billion (the largest private tech investment ever) for Ant Financial: A company he created in December 2014. The company has gone from zero to $60 billion in value in just 16 months. Jack Ma has never taken no for an answer. In September, 2014, when he was not able to list his company, Alibaba, in Hong Kong, and with China banning any foreign ownership of its companies, Jac k got around the rules by setting up a Cayman Island shell corporation which would receive a percentage of the profits of Alibaba. He then listed the Cayman Island company on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $25 billion in the largest IPO in history - without giving any of the shares in his China company away. Before the listing, he took the payment side of the business, Alipay, and moved it into a separate, private company that he controlled, called Ant Financial. As Alibaba has been making headlines over the last year, Ant Financial has been quietly growing as Jack’s second ...

WHAT IS A START UP(INTRODUCTION) What comes to your mind when one says the word 'STARTUP'? , innovation, new trends, disruptive technology, experimental business models, scrappy young entrepreneurs, success/failure, revolutions, instability, immediate impact, name it........these words and so many others phrases keep criss-crossing one's mind when one talks about startups and this can be depicted in the different definitions of a 'STARTUP' below. A startup is an experiment in search of a business model -SOLOMON KITUMBA founder and C.E.O YOZA. A startup is a young company that is just starting to develop, startups are usually small and initially financed and operated by a handful of founders or one individual, these companies offer a product or service that is not currently being offered elsewhere in the market or that the founders believe is being offered in an inferior manner-'inestopedia'  A startup is a company working to solve a problem where ...

Back in the days, the people of Uganda used to trade with other communities and those that do tradings with them ar e often from Europe, Arabia, and East Africa. These traders offer mirrors, guns, cloth, beads, and other products in exchange of silver, gold, and slaves from Uganda. After some time of this successful barter, European explorers like John Speke and H.M. Stanley reached Uganda and saw the wonderful opportunities present on the country. These two went back to their country, Britain, and incessantly convinced their leaders to come and conquer Uganda–so it did and sent lots of explorers and missionaries. The group that followed after the two British explorers were from the Imperial British East African Company. They controlled the trade in a very large part of the country and this paved the way for Uganda to become a British colony. Some of the major changes that came out of these were the replacement of cowry shells as money to Indian rupees, the constru...

Heritage Oil and Gas Ltd Company knew beforehand of a capital gains tax that Uganda later imposed, and worked aggressively to circumvent it, according to previously unreported details contained in internal correspondences. The company, also known as HOGL, besides deciding to fight the tax liability head-on, engineered a re-domiciliation from the Bahamas to Mauritius in a move that would have benefited it since Uganda has a double-taxation agreement with the latter. In an April 1 2016 email to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, HOGL, through a law firm, Carter-Ruck Solicitors, said the process of re-domiciliation began “long before the completion of the transaction [in Uganda] … [and] for a variety of business reasons”. After HOGL, in 2010, sold its 50% stake in Uganda’s oil fields at US$1.5 billion (UGX5tn) to Tullow Uganda Ltd, yielding the first biggest windfall of the country’s nascent petroleum sector at the time, the government through the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) slapped a...

Revelations from the Panama Papers show how a company based in Jersey, a British crown dependency, attempted to avoid paying $400m (£280m) in Capital Gains Tax to the Ugandan government, writes BBC Africa's Rob Wilson. In 2010, Heritage Oil and Gas Ltd realised it would be hit with a huge tax bill and started making efforts to avoid it by moving the country where the company was registered from the Bahamas to Mauritius, leaked emails obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with the BBC show. Mauritius has a double-tax agreement with Uganda, which in principle means companies pay tax in only one of the two countries. Since Mauritius does not impose any Capital Gains Tax, charged on the sale of assets, this would mean Heritage reduces its bill to zero.

Ev ery person, and especially   every entrepreneur, should embrace failure with open arms. It is only through failure that we learn. Many of the world’s finest minds have learned this the hard   way – here are some my favorite quotes on the importance of failure, and the road to success. 10. When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.                                                     - Eloise Ristad 9. Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.                             ...

1. Be able to change your mental state at will. It’s too easy to let your emotions and overall mood dominate your every thought and action. You could wake up to a rainy day and let the weather be the deciding factor of how you’ll feel for the next twelve hours. In fact, that’s what most people do - but remember, you're not most people. You're someone who has taken charge of your own life: you're an entrepreneur. You need to make the conscious decision, every day, that you will have a great day. Nobody cares about what you’re going through. Nobody cares about the petty things that are bothering you. Flip on the switch of positivity and spread goodwill. "A professional is a person who can do his/her job when he/she doesn’t feel like it. An amateur is a person who can’t do his/her job when he/she does feel like it." – James Agate 2. Wake up early. This should be a given, but it is not. I can’t count the times acquaintances who "were in business...