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
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iGamingBusiness | Issue 112 | September/October 2018