Chinese mobile phone brand Transsion continued to lead the African feature phone market in the third quarter of 2019, with a share of 64.0%. Nokia followed closely with a 10.0% share, IDC figures show.
In the field of smart phones, Transsion has a market share of 36.2%, Samsung has a market share of 23.9%, and Huawei has a market share of 11.4%.
Africa's overall mobile phone market reached 55.8 million units in the third quarter of 2019, of which feature phones accounted for 59.4% of the total, while smartphones accounted for 40.6%.
Africa's smartphone market shipments reach a total of 22.6 million units in the third quarter, increasing by 4.0%.
Growth in the African smartphone market was driven by mobile phone shipments in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt.
According to IDC, the total mobile phone market in Africa in 2019 will reach 218.2 million units. Smart phone shipments this year totaled 91 million units, an increase of 3.2% over 2018, and feature phone shipments in 2019 are expected to remain stable at 127.2 million units, an increase of 0.1% year-on-year.
Ramazan Yavuz, research manager at IDC, said: "Considering the 5G market in Africa, the acceleration of innovation will allow the possibility of technological leapfrogging in this area." Ramazin Yavuz expects speed of popularization of 5G smartphones is expected to be faster, because the price of 5G mobile phones will become cheaper after the launch.
According to earlier reports from African media, at the annual conference of AfricaCom, Huawei and South African telecommunications company MTN signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU), and the two parties will establish a joint 5G innovation project to evaluate and study 5G and artificial intelligence (AI ) And other new technologies.
Through these innovations, South Africa's MTN is expected to develop applications with social impact, including smart cities and education, driven by 5G and artificial intelligence technologies.
Giovanni Chiarelli, chief technology and information officer of MTN, said that the C-band 5G trials demonstrated the strength of this new technology, while giving customers a glimpse into the future and demonstrating next-generation consumer and enterprise customers.
He then added that "MTN will further cooperate with Huawei to accelerate the deployment of commercial 5G."
In the AfricaCom media release area, Huawei and MTN demonstrated use cases including 5G speed testing and a series of 5G real-time demonstrations, such as cloud virtual reality (VR) games, robot arm test platforms, and augmented reality (AR) glasses.
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