Going mobile for Africa
SAGRAN Pillay plans to expand Mint Connect’s footprint across Africa to meet demand for the company’s premium low-cost mobile devices.
Pillay says the company plans to penetrate the multibillion-rand telecommunications industry on the continent.
He says Mint Connect has so far sold more than 7.5 million smart phones in southern Africa, making it the largest supplier of the gadgets in this lucrative regional economy.
In South Africa, the company supplies nearly 400 000 mobile devices.
Mint Connect is owned by
Pillay, former SA Revenue Service commissioner Oupa Magashule and entrepreneur Rob Bruggeman.
They took over mobile brand Alcatel’s Boksburg factory when the company disinvested in South Africa in 2002.
Pillay describes himself as a telecommunications engineer. He says the transaction was a wellstructured deal that left none of the 300 Alcatel employees without a job.
He says while plotting ways to diversify their business in 2010, they discovered that only the affluent were being catered for with cellphones while a huge section of the population was being bypassed.
“We wanted to make technology accessible to people in the LSM 3-7 groups by bringing affordable mobile devices into the market.
In 2014/2015 we introduced the Mint F1 cellphone through MTN, which sold for R99,” says Pillay, who holds an MBA from the Wits Business School.
“We sold over 2 million devices in one month. It remained the bestselling phone for several months.”
Pillay and his colleagues then started casting their nets wider and looking at affordable smartphones. In 2015/2016 the company launched the Mint Fox smartphone which sold for R399 and more than 1.2 million devices were sold.
Pillay says they are working with retailers such as Pep Stores, Game and Edcon, among others, who sell the devices to their markets in Africa.
The firm has recently inked a deal with Botswana’s Cellular City which has exclusive distribution rights to the Mint brand in the landlocked country.
“We are slowly moving our footprint into Africa,” says Pillay, adding that they are looking to the continent as cellphone penetration in South Africa has reached a ceiling.
Mobile research group GSMA Intelligence puts South Africa behind Nigeria as the largest mobile market on the continent.
The study projects that the number of unique mobile subscribers in sub-saharan Africa will grow from 420 million at the end of 2016 to
535 million in 2020, making it the fastest-growing region in the world over this period.
It says mobile technologies and services generated $110 billion of economic value in Sub-saharan Africa in 2016, which is equivalent to 7.7% of regional gross domestic product, and this figure was expected to surge to $142bn (8.6% of GDP) by 2020.
“We are looking at countries with a high growth rate and slow cellphone penetration. We are looking for stable markets,” says Pillay, who was born and grew up in Cato Manor in Durban.
He says the government has been slow in digitising the country, arguing that if everyone had access to the internet, South Africa’s GDP could grow by 2 percent a year.
Pillay says the company’s vision is to diversify and branch into software development in the next two years. Besides providing mobile devices, the company also manufactures Dstv decoders and TV sets.
He says he is unfazed about competition as it it keeps them on their toes to stay at the forefront of the technological revolution.
“We’ve had huge successes in automobile manufacturing in this country,” he says. “Our belief is, why can’t we do the same in the electronics and clothing spaces? These are high-volume industries.”