{"id":71177,"date":"2014-10-19T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T10:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=71177"},"modified":"2014-10-17T17:39:25","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T15:39:25","slug":"smartphone-boom-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/71177\/smartphone-boom-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Smartphone boom in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Middle East and Africa (MEA) handset market grew to its largest size in ten quarters in Q2 2014, expanding 27% year on year to total 64 million units, according to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC).<\/p>\n

The IDC said that the majority of this growth was seen in the smartphone category, with a major shift underway in the composition of the market.<\/p>\n

The smartphone share of the overall MEA handset market jumped 13 percentage points year on year to reach 40% in Q2 2014, with that figure reaching as high as 75\u201380% in some of the region’s more developed countries.<\/p>\n

In Africa, Egypt and South Africa posted the largest year-on-year handset shipment growth, at 37% and 32%, respectively; while in the Middle East, the top growth spot was taken by the UAE and Qatar, with respective growth of 27% and 32%.<\/p>\n

The remaining MEA countries also posted growth over the same quarter in 2013, despite some \u2014 such as Iraq and Syria \u2014 experiencing extreme levels of instability.<\/p>\n

“This universal growth is unique to this technology segment,” said Nabila Popal, research manager with IDC’s Systems and Infrastructure Systems Group.<\/p>\n

“This is because phones are no longer simply a means of communication between people. Indeed, smartphones are becoming a way of expression and a window to the rest of the world, and this aspect is proving particularly important in lesser developed countries that are suffering from unrelenting political turmoil.”<\/p>\n

The Q2 2014 IDC Handsets Quarterly Tracker shows that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Kuwait are leading the smartphone migration trend, with smartphone share in each country surpassing 75%.<\/p>\n

However, even for countries with lower smartphone penetration levels like Nigeria and Kenya, the share has doubled since this time last year<\/strong> and continues to grow at a rapid pace, IDC said.<\/p>\n

Vendor leaders<\/h3>\n

In the smartphone class, Samsung remains the comfortable leader with 45% of the MEA market, but its share is down 8 points from a year ago.<\/p>\n

Huawei’s share has jumped from 2% to 10%, putting the vendor in second place, ahead of Apple (8%) and Nokia (6%).<\/p>\n

BlackBerry continued to suffer, enduring the biggest drop in smartphone market share of all vendors, from over 12% in 2013 to just under 2% this year, IDC noted.<\/p>\n

\"MEA<\/a>

MEA market vendors<\/p><\/div>\n

In the feature phone segment, Nokia is still top with 35% share, although this is down from 47% in Q2 2013.<\/p>\n

Techno, Samsung, and Qmobile (a brand from Pakistan) follow in that order, with shares of 11.5%, 10.7%, and 7.3% respectively, all of which also refect year-on-year share declines.<\/p>\n

More on smartphones<\/h3>\n

Vodacom network fastest for smartphones<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lenovo targets 100 million smartphones<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Low-cost smartphones the next big market<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Microsoft sets cheaper smartphones in its sights<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The MEA handset market grew to its largest size in ten quarters in Q2 2014, expanding 27% year on year to total 64 million units – with the largest growth seen in smartphones<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":27337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[26,625,117],"class_list":["post-71177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobile","tag-headline","tag-idc","tag-smartphones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71183,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71177\/revisions\/71183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}