Nokia Losing Mobile Internet Traffic Market Share in South Africa

Monday, 13 July 2009 09:55 Special Reports

Mobile ad agency, mKhoj has reported that the market share of mobile internet traffic from Nokia handsets in South Africa has dropped from 46% in January to 39% last month.

Samsung currently holds 33% of the market, and rose from 20% in January. The iPhone made its entrée into the market, but only contributes 0.06% of the total network traffic, making it a relatively small but growing player.

Several aspects make the South African market very different from European or North American markets, including cultural and sociological factors. Not only does South Africa have 11 officially recognized languages, scores of other African, European and Asian languages are spoken in South Africa. Couple this with mobile penetration over 100%, and you have an ideal opportunity for mobile marketers with advanced targeting capabilities to capture the cultural context and nuances of languages.

The top five handsets by market share are as follows:

Samsung SGH E250 - 9.16%
Samsung A110 - 4.93%
Nokia N90 - 4.54%
Nokia N70 - 2.93%
Samsung M620 - 2.60%

Although Vodacom is the largest operator by subscriber base, mKhoj puts it at bottom of the rankings for mobile internet traffic, behind MTN and Cell C.

"We believe these results reinforce our partners' confidence in our value to provide the best results through intelligent mobile web advertising solutions," said Naveen Tewari, CEO and founder of mKhoj. "We're proud to be recognized as the leading mobile advertising network in South Africa."