Two thirds of all device units sold in Kenya for the last two years have been smartphones, says the country’s largest mobile operator by market share Safaricom.
Safaricom, which is Kenya’s biggest mobile operator with over 20 million subscribers, says that there has been a consistent rise in demand for smartphones in the country.
The company says Kenya is witnessing “100,000” smartphone sales each month thanks to the country’s growing middle class.
The World Bank characterises Kenya as a low-income country, but the nation is East Africa’s biggest economy with gross domestic product (GDP) growth of around 6 per cent per year in the last decade.
“Between the year 2013/2014, 67 per cent of total device units sold in the country were smartphones,” says Safaricom.
“The smartphone market is also expected to double in the next two years in Kenya and the rest of Africa,” says Safaricom.
Safaricom has gone on further to say that “over 400,000 high-end Samsung devices were sold in 2013 representing 23 per cent of the smartphone devices sold through the Safaricom retail outlets in Kenya during the period.”
These revelations have come about as Samsung decided to have one of its “first ever global launches” of a smartphone device in the country.
