African Business Professionals Migrating to Mobile Devices

The African business community is adopting the use of mobile devices very rapidly. This is the main conclusion drawn from the survey conducted by the Africa Business Panel.

1776 African business professionals did participate in the survey.

The survey demonstrates that only 67 percent of Africa business professionals are using a desktop, versus 94 percent using laptops.

The tablet, a relatively new mobile innovation, is already adopted by 47 percent of the African business world. 76 percent use a smartphone, which is more than the use of the classic mobile phone (64%). 9 percent possess both a private and a company smartphone.

On Security, the survey found that laptops are best protected. 87 percent of the laptop owners in the survey had software security installed.

Of users of desktops, 76 percent made use of security. For tablets, 46 percent, and the least protected are smartphones (44%).

The main reasons for not installing security software are high costs (39%), the lack of urgency (32%) and complexity (17%).

The most used software security is McAfee (31%), followed by Microsoft (30%), Kapersky (28%), AVG/Grisoft (28%) and Symantec (16%).

On usage, it found that smartphones are used most frequently. 65 percent of the participants in the survey use their smartphones several times a day, 54 percent use their laptops just as frequently, with users of tablets following at 44 percent.

22 percent never use their personally owned mobile phone for work related communication as opposed to the smartphone, of which 6 percent of the owners say they never use it.

The rise of mobile devices is confirmed by the survey participants. 60 percent expect a strong increase in the use of smartphones. For the tablet and the laptop, response in perceived increase was 58 and 44 percent respectively.

On the other hand, asked about which devices the participants expected a strong decrease in use, 32 percent indicated the desktop, versus only 4 percent for both smartphone and tablet.

Blackberry still a big brand in Africa, iPhone comes third after Samsung. Samsung is the leading smartphone brand in Africa.

30 percent of respondents that have a personal smartphone, have a Samsung. Blackberry is runner-up (22%), iPhone comes in third place (19%), prior to Nokia (11%), HTC (6%), Sony Ericsson (2%), LG (1%) and Motorola (1%).

The - smaller - market for company owned smartphones is led by Blackberry (31%), followed by Samsung (25%) and iPhone (23%).