INSIGHT
INSIGHT
UPWARDLY
MOBILE
With a young and rising population that currently stands at 1.2 billion, Africa
would seem to present operators with unrivalled opportunities. But tailoring
an offer 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 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 that
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
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iGB Affiliate Issue 71 OCT/NOV 2018
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 very different
challenges 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 the
product that you use needs to be light
on data, which is pretty hard. When
you look at a traditional European
“Data is really
expensive in Africa”
Scott Canny, BET.co.za
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: Sub-Saharan Africa
2018, GSMA estimates that mobile
broadband covers only about two-
thirds of the sub-Saharan African
population, with around 400 million
people unable to access coverage. This
has severely limited the growth of