Africa Focus
the product that you use needs to be light on data, which is pretty hard.
When you look at a traditional European sportsbook with thousands
of matches and thousands of markets and cool little visualisations and
pieces of technology, they all use up data.”
For regions such as Africa, tech giants such as YouTube and Google
have designed lightweight apps that use less data. Now Dolan Beuthin,
founder and CEO of BestBet360 and PlayKwik, new sites soon to launch
in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, reckons igaming firms would be wise to also adapt their
products to the more basic nature of the Africa market. “It is taken for
granted in Europe that you will always get a decent mobile network or
decent internet connection,” he says, “but in Africa you’ll often find that
you have got shocking internet connection and very slow speeds and as
a result of that the games don’t display correctly.”
Indeed, in a report entitled
The Mobile Economy:
“In Africa you’ll often find
Sub-Saharan Africa 2018,
GSMA estimates that mobile
broadband covers only about
two-thirds of the sub-Saharan
African population, with
approximately 400 million people unable to access coverage.
This has severely limited the growth of some types of games across
the continent. Virtual sports, for example, have proven popular with
sports-mad African punters but the bandwidth and streaming
requirements of virtual games have meant they are not easily accessible
on mobile devices. Hence they remain largely limited to the retail
environment.
Unfortunately, says Beuthin, this type of problem is something
developers often struggle to comprehend. “Africa is still very third world
in a sense and a lot of game developers don’t understand that. They are
developing for the first world, they are developing for Europe. They have
to change their product for Africa and adapt it.”
This is particularly true when considering many people in Africa are
also using much older phones and operating systems than would be
found in more developed parts of the world. When combined with the
fact that most African countries have vastly different payment systems
to developed countries, this means localising offerings to take all these
factors into account is key to success for operators.
For example, Canny says Betwa y and SportPesa have thrived in Kenya
due to the fact they latched onto local market trends. “They were very
quick to capitalise on M-Pesa, the mobile money system out there, which
makes it very easy for people to transact using just their phones.
“Also, Europeans might see things like USSD and SMS as primitive
technologies but they have really innovated in the space and used
older technologies in a really smart way to get to a market that doesn’t
necessarily have smartphones or online banking.”
According to Ramnani, SMS is also an important marketing tool,
along with utilising the opportunities provided by retail outlets. “Having
a retail presence does strengthen you on the street as you have that
outdoor branding,” he says.
Dhrupal Amin, managing director at G-Bets, which operates in
South Africa, Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania, says operators
need to remember that there can be wild variations between what
works in one country and another. Thus operators adopting a pan-
African strategy must be prepared to adapt their marketing strategies
accordingly. “South Africa in a sense has a lot of what you’d expect in
Europe, where you can do multichannel marketing. If I look at a place
like Mozambique, where we are currently marketing across major
channels – we are doing TV, radio and traditional press – there is a
very different infrastructure. It is not as organised and doesn’t speak to
everyone in a way that a more mature market speaks to them.
“In Mozambique, because we are new entrants it is trial and error.
For example, we’ve seen some success with TV but not so much with
traditional print media. Even though the distribution is wide we are not
seeing that benefit.”
that you have got
shocking internet connection
and very slow speeds”
Expanding beyond sports
While country-by-country
localisation is clearly a vital
component of success for those
competing in the currently betting-
focused market, a broader localisation effort is needed to expand the
continent beyond the sports betting vertical. While traditional sports
betting has already taken steps into virtual sports, lottery betting and
in-play betting in some African markets, so far the casino vertical has
yet to make any significant in-roads in the continent.
But it is set to make great strides in the coming years, predicts
John Kamara, director at Global Gaming Africa. “Consumers are really
looking for the next thing. They are enjoying their sports betting, but
you can see they are slowly learning about other things. My prediction for
the next three or four years is that online casino is going to be the
next revolution.”
Partly, casino has been held back because its legal status is less
clear than that of sports betting, particularly given that in the region’s
most established market of South Africa online casino remains
illegal. But it has also been held back by operators putting the wrong
proposition to punters, says Beuthin. “You need to start with very
basic games and very simple games and I think that European
providers offering their games have given the operators far too
sophisticated offerings.”
But like Kamara, he is optimistic about the vertical’s future. “Casino
is still bigger than sports betting across the world and as soon as the
market gets educated here, and again there is the matter of internet
connection and data costs, as soon as all those hurdles are overcome I
think casino will be a good vertical.”
With rapid innovation in the areas of fintech, regulation and
connectivity in Africa, it’s clear there’s plenty of untapped potential when
it comes to mobile betting and gaming on the continent. But tapping
into that potential requires much more than a boilerplate approach –
companies wanting to expand into and across Africa need to tailor their
offering carefully to succeed.
i GamingBusiness | Issue 112 | September/October 2018
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