MTN leads the pack in smartphone use

MTN’s June interim results announced this week were a revelation for more reasons than a stagnant South African user base and falling revenue per user.

Lurking in their numbers was this startling gem: MTN now has more smartphones active on its network than any other operator, having reached the 6.5 million mark.

Vodacom recently reported that, at the end of March, it had 6 million smartphones active on its network. It had added about 1.2 million over the previous year, suggesting about 300 000 new smartphone users hopping aboard every few months.

At that rate, Vodacom is still marginally behind MTN, with 6.3 million smartphones at the end of June.

Add in, conservatively, about 1.2 million smartphones active on the Cell C and Telkom Mobile networks, and we have a total smartphone user base in South Africa of 14 million smartphones at the end of June.

Considering that the total stood at 11.5 million at the end of last year, that indicates dramatic growth of devices that can access the internet and take advantage of the new world of apps. In only six months, smartphone penetration leapt from 22% to 27% of the population.

Count only cellphone users, and smartphone share has gone up from 28% to 35%. At this rate, by the end of 2015, more than half of South Africa’s phone users will be operating on smartphones.

Of course, not all smartphones are born equal, so it’s important to understand just what constitutes the smartphone market.

Some would argue that the notion of the smartphone itself must be redefined. Gaining ground is a view that old BlackBerry devices are not smartphones.

That’s an absurd argument, given that BlackBerry all but invented the smartphone.

They weren’t the first, but they were the first to create a mass-market smartphone and they kick-started the smartphone era with their email-friendly devices in the early 2000s.

The BlackBerry era is clearly over, with the news this week that the company is considering options for a buyout. In most industrialised countries, its market share is in free fall.

But in developing countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Indonesia, it is still the dominant smartphone brand. It has about 5.5 million devices in use in South Africa — with the youth market making up more than half that number.

Trailing in second place, Nokia has about 4.2 million smartphones in use.

However, a high proportion of those are traditional “office phones” running on the old Symbian operating system, which Nokia is phasing out. Their new Windows phones are still leaving the starting blocks, with only a few hundred thousand in customers’ hands.

The big up-and-coming smartphone brand in South Africa is, not surprisingly, Samsung.

Led by the Galaxy S4 at the top end and the Galaxy Pocket at the bottom, it has sold well over 2 million smartphones in South Africa. These are all phones running on the Android operating system (OS).

Add in Sony and HTC sales of Android devices, and Android has just reached around half the size of the BlackBerry user base in South Africa.

Sony is on the rise; HTC is in as much trouble here as in the rest of the world. However, the joint OS battlefront they share with Samsung is clearly destined to become the dominant OS in South Africa.

Holding up the bottom of the smartphone league table in South Africa, the Apple iPhone is only now reaching the million mark. Only if Apple announces a cheap version in the next few weeks will it be able to challenge Samsung and Android in South Africa.

Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-inchief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee