iGaming Business magazine Africa Focus | Page 12

Africa Focus UPWARDLY MOBILE With a young and rising population that currently stands at 1.2 billion, Africa would seem to offer operators unrivalled opportunities. But tailoring an offer to what is seen by many as a ‘mobile- only’ market presents a unique set of challenges, writes Joanne Christie In recent years European operators have increasingly been promoting their products and brands as ‘mobile-first’, in recognition of the fact there’s been a huge swing in player preferences away from desktop towards mobile. In Africa, it’s barely even a choice – for brands wanting to attract online customers it’s not so much a ‘mobile-first’ market as simply a mobile market. While it’s difficult to generalise across a continent with so many different countries, it’s fair to say the majority of African operators’ gambling business is coming from either mobile or retail, with desktop barely getting a look in. “Across Africa there is that leapfrogging phenomenon where you have millions of people whose first experience of the internet is via their mobile devices and they have yet to ever experience internet via laptops or PCs,” says Sudeep Ramnani, CEO at SportyBet, which operates in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana and is soon to launch in Tanzania. At first glance, the numbers look great. Africa has a population of 1.2 billion people, it has the youngest population in the world and it also has the fastest growing mobile market, according to Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA). But mobile in Africa and mobile in Europe are two very different things. Even in South Africa, the African outlier in many respects with an advanced industry more akin to European markets than the rest of the continent, operators face challenges that are very different from those they have to overcome in other parts of the world. Infrastructure limitations “The big difference between mobile in Africa and South Africa compared with Europe is what I would call data or broadband scarcity,” says Scott Canny, CEO at South African operator BET.co.za. “Data is really expensive in Africa, even more so when you think about it relative to income, so 54 iGamingBusiness | Issue 112 | September/October 2018