After moving from accounted sales of 90 million mobile phones in 2005 to an estimated 450 million in 2012, Africa has now become the world’s second largest mobile phone market after China.The vice president and chief operating officer of Samsung Electronics Africa, Mr George Ferreira, made this known at the Africa Regional launch for the manufacturer’s new Galaxy Note II, held in Cape Town, South Africa. Major brands like Nokia and LG keep shipping millions of cellphones to Africa – a market with high utility, constantly consuming new products. As recognition of the indisputable importance of the market, manufacturers even add functional features like in-built radio and torchlight to its products moving to the electricity-starved continent. In October, Samsung said from January 2013 it would begin integrating African content, including languages on its phones, in an effort to appeal more to the market responsible for about 40 per cent of its phone sales.At the launch, Mr Ferreira added that Nigeria, Africa’s second largest economy, with a reach of 41 per cent, has the highest cellphone penetration on the continent. South Africa, the continent’s greatest attractor of foreign investment, followed with a 31 per cent penetration, with east Africa’s tech hub, Kenya, trailing on a seven per cent reach. The arch rival of Apple has laid down plans to leverage on the development and further deepen smartphone penetration on the continent, expanding its share of the increasing market across Africa.Samsung Electronics West Africa’s mobile business leader for Nigeria, Mr Emmanuel Revmatas, noted that the advent of new privately-owned submarine cables (some of which are optic-fibres), and their landing on the coast of East and West African nations, have significantly reduced the cost of internet service and escalated the acceptance of smartphones.“Mobile broadband penetration has increased tremendously over the last few years and all across Africa, we are witnessing continued investment in infrastructure by most of the network operators, making it possible for telecom subscribers to take full advantage of a world of endless opportunities that smart devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note II offers,” said Mr Revmatas.Meanwhile, Kenya’s GSM Association has called on Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki to cancel and reject a proposed law that would levy a 10 per cent tariff on all mobile money transfer transactions in the county. The move, GSMA argued, would push the costs up for users and stall the widespread success of the mobile money market in the East African country.GSMA said the new tax would “hit operators’ earnings, raise transaction fees and reduce investments in Kenya’s mobile money transfer market, whose value of transactions has increased fivefold in the past three years.”Telecom operators in the country have also voiced their concern over the proposed new taxes, saying it would affect all aspects of the mobile money sector in Kenya and raise costs for users.The tax is aimed to help remove a financing shortfall created by the recent rise in salaries for civil servants and by increased expenditure on implementation of the Constitution, the government has argued. Agencies
