Arthur Goldstuck of World Wide Worx shared some very important data about the South African mobile internet at yesterday’s NetProphet conference. Sponsor White Wall Web did a brief summary, and here is some additional information from my own notes*:
First up, a useful set of distinctions between different tiers of “the mobile internet” in South Africa:
- Tier 1: The WAP internet (used to download ringtones, wallpapers, etc). There are about 15m WAP-capable phones in SA right now, and about 14m actual users.
- Tier 2: The Mobile application internet (covering Mxit, Facebook, Twitter etc). There are about 15m MXIT accounts, but a very high proportion of people have downloaded the application then never used it. There are probably 10.56 m actual users (Arthur’s latest figures).
- Tier 3: Mobile web browsing – consciously using the internet. This accounts for around 4m people at most.
So if you’re after “the mobile internet market” in South Africa, who do you target? Understanding the difference between these three tiers of use is important, but you also need to know who’s actually spending money, on what.
The Mobility 2009/10 survey sampled urban mobile users and revealed two categories of interest:
- The “Elephants” (about 10% of the total): These are high spenders, but their mobile use is unsophisticated – they tend to have high-performance phone with lots of features they don’t use (Arthur put this down to lack of knowledge – I’m not sure; preferences and the availability of other means of access probably also have a lot to do with it). Only 12% of Elephants use their phones to access the internet – if they do use the internet, they prefer to do so at home. Their use of mobile applications is lower than the average for all users. In short — this is not a viable target market for mobile applications. (I suspect this is the market segment I fall into: my iPhone is nice, but frankly I find it easier to use Twitter, etc on my Macbook).
- The “Sophisticats” (about 9% of the total): Also high spenders, AND also very sophisticated in their use of their phones. They are more likely to access the internet on their phones than at home, and 52% of them vs just 19% of the Elephants can download applications on their phones.
The Sophisticats are your market, then. Don’t even think of trying to sell mobile apps to the whole country — South Africa may have 38 million mobile users (that’s actual users, not SIM cards), but it’s not a targetable market.
Things get even more interesting when you start comparing this market segmentation with the results of another survey World Wide Worx ran on schoolchildren in Gauteng, comparing the digital sophistication of 1400 private school vs 300 township school learners. The learners were asked to rate their own level of skill in various areas of PC and mobile phone use, with revealing and often surprising results:
- 85% of private school kids vs 20% of township kids rate themselves “advanced” at general use of PCs; the comparable figures for using Windows are 85% vs 42%.
- The kids rated their parents as less advanced than themselves, with the gap largest for township learners, suggesting that the support structure of parents and teachers is important.
- Parents and teachers think learners are a lot less advanced than the learners themselves think they are (just 53% of private school teachers rated their students advanced). That’s not just an artefact of boasting by the kids, either – they didn’t uniformly rate themselves good at everything, but presented a nuanced and believable picture of skill that varied across applications. (I’d still like to be sure that adults and learners were using the same definition of “advanced”, though – might learners not be honest but mistaken in estimating their own skill?).
- When it comes to general internet use, 85% of private school vs 30% of township school learners rate themselves advanced.
- The more specific the question, the narrower the gap gets: 44% of township learners rate themselves advanced Google users; for LiveSearch the figure is 22%, for Wolfram Alpha it’s 10% and for Ask Jeeves it’s 8%.
- 84% of private school vs 36% of township learners rate themselves advanced Facebook users.
- And how’s this: 45% of township kids rate themselves advanced at downloading multimedia content, and 32% at editing it.
- The gap narrows even further when it comes to cellphones: 46% of township learners rate themselves advanced at browsing the net on their phones, 38% at using email, 69% at using SMS and 67% at MXIT.
- Of private school learners, 76% rated rated themselves advanced at browsing the net on their phones, 90% at SMS and 64% at MXIT.
- MXIT’s lower cost clearly gives it an edge among township learners!
None of this, says Goldstuck, suggests that any of these kids are “born digital-ready”. The big secret, rather, is peer group learning: once their peers latch onto a new app, kids adopt it very fast. The big spike in Facebook use once they get to university reflects this. And there’s a problem: younger kids who are learning the Internet via Facebook think it IS the internet – outside its walled garden, they’re clueless.
It’s not about your age, though; it’s about what your digital peer group is doing and talking about. The message for those hoping to build a business for this market? Build digital peer group learning into both your development model and your business model.
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*All errors, omissions and misrepresentations purely mine. If you find any, please feel free to correct me.
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