Samsung Electronics, one of the leading Smartphone manufacturers, has disclosed plans to supply half of the estimated 20 million smartphones to be sold on the continent this year with the intention of doubling sales in 2014.
“Samsung this year will ship 50 percent of all the smartphones in Africa,” Thabiet Allie, head, Content and Services for Samsung Electronics Africa, said.
“Next year we are looking at doubling this number and the year after probably doing a substantial increase,” Allie furthered at the telecom conference.
He made the statement in Cape Town at the annual AfricaCom conference adding that of the 100 million mobile phones sold in Africa, a fifth of them are smartphones.
Smartphone sales and usage is on the increase in Africa, thanks to the growing population of its young tech-savvy individual which is attracting foreign vendors of consumer products like smartphones.
A recent study published by GSMA Intelligence this week on the socio-economic impact of the mobile industry in Sub-Saharan Africa revealed that Sub-Saharan Smartphone penetration was 4 percent, compared with a global average of 17 percent at the end of 2012.
The report which pointed out that by mid-2013, there were 253 million unique mobile subscribers and 502 million connections, also noted that smartphones will constitute 20 percent of the Africa market by 2017.