TMCnet News
Local handset market in massive growth(CAJ News Agency Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) THE Middle East and Africa (MEA) handset market grew to its largest size in ten quarters in the second quarter of this year. This is according to the global advisory and consulting services firm International Data Corporation (IDC) which disclosed the market grew 27 percent year on year to total 64 million units. According to IDC the majority of this growth was seen in the smartphone category, with a major shift underway in the composition of the market. Indeed, smartphone share of the overall MEA handset market jumped 13 percentage points year on year to reach 40 percent in Q2 2014, with that figure reaching as high as 7580 percent in some of the region's more developed countries. Within Africa, Egypt and South Africa posted the largest yearonyear handset shipment growth, at 37 percent and 32 percent respectively. The Q2 2014 IDC Handsets Quarterly Tracker shows countries with lower smartphone penetration levels like Nigeria and Kenya, the share has doubled since this time last year and continues to grow at a rapid pace. "This massive and widespread growth is primarily due to the availability of extremely lowcost smartphones from various Chinese and Indian vendors, while vendors like Samsung, Huawei, and Lenovo have also launched models in the low to midrange price bands," Nabila Popal, research manager with IDC's Systems and Infrastructure Systems Group, said. "Another factor driving smartphone growth is telecom operators in the region offering better data plans and subsidized phones," he added. Analyzing the vendor rankings by device type, in the smartphone segment, Samsung remains the comfortable leader with 45 percent of the MEA market, but its share is down 8 points from a year ago. Huawei's share has jumped from 2 percent to 10 percent putting the vendor in second place, ahead of Apple (8 percent) and Nokia (6 percent). BlackBerry continues to suffer, enduring the biggest drop in smartphone market share of all vendors, from over 12 percent in 2013 to just under 2 percent this year. In the feature phone segment, Nokia is still top with 35 percent share, although this is down from 47 percent. Techno, Samsung, and Qmobile follow in that order, with shares of 11,5 percent, 10,7 percent and 7,3 percent respectively. |