Africa’s smartphone shipments overtake Europe’s this quarter

We all have resonating at the back of our mind those crazy African mobile trends; Africa is factually mobile; Sub-Sahara Africa has been now for 5 years the fastest growing region in the world; the Mobile subscriber base is keeping growing at CAGR 7% per year by 2020 and showing no signs of slowing any time soon as GSMA often reminds. Extremely impressive dynamics.

However to Tidjane and I, the year 2016 confirmed a more fundamental change: the change in African consumer habits with the number of smartphones sales that overtook feature phones sales. The increasing availability of low cost smartphones has strongly accelerated the move with below USD50 price point being reached. Some may argue that we are still behind the 78% worldwide ratio for smartphone vs feature phone shipments, but the reality is that Africa has simply and irreversibly shifted to high-end devices. With 540 millions of smartphones forecasted by 2020 according to GSMA, Africa smartphone adoption is ramping up at CAGR 27.5% per year…

But one real surprise jumped out while reviewing the GSMA figures to evaluate how fast the smartphone adoption was accelerating on the continent: right now, Q3’2016, is the quarter when Africa’s smartphones shipments overtake Europe’s shipments!

That really says a lot!

First, that It is drastically reshaping the entire smartphone industry, nothing less. Old-days business models built on long-term perspectives coming from developed markets are not sustainable anymore. Smartphone global sales are now driven by the demand coming from emerging markets for cost effective data-driven handsets. Legacy vendors are getting disrupted by new players focusing heavily on delivering this. See how Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi are now solidly installed in the top 5 with Samsung still leading but Apple suffering heavily (Gartner Q1’16 Global handset shipment report).

Second, the smartphone adoption is accelerating the explosive growth of internet usage. Mobile broadband subscription is scaling with a magnitude never seen at double the rate of the rest of the world to reach 38% of African mobile users by 2020.

Well, with smartphone prices going down, we now only need efforts from MNOs to democratize data plan pricing, come up with innovative mobile subscription bundles, to secure a competitive digital transformation i.e. the one set to answer the huge mobile & online consumer demand.

Africa is on!