The African Mobile market can grow to rival the Western European one, with figures showing that Africa is now serving more mobile ad impressions than Western Europe. This was announced at the inaugural Mobile Marketing Summit Kenya held at the Norfolk yesterday. The summit was organized by the recently formed Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) of East Africa which is an off shoot of the South African chapter. The summit’s mission was to bring together those interested in the mobile sector. Statistics presented by Brett St Clair, MMA South Africa co-chair and head of mobile, Google South Africa indicate that Africa has grown from 1.5 billion impressions in 2009 to 5.2 billion impressions in 2010 versus 1.8 billion impressions from Western Europe in 2009 and 3.7 billion in Western Europe for 2010. East African Traffic on admob served mobile ad impressions, with Kenya on the lead at 83,280,081 impressions followed by Sudan with 67,412,953 and Tanzania with 19, 538,700. Ethiopia came in fourth with 10,339,614 impressions followed by Uganda with 3,295,615 impressions and Rwanda with 2,139,805. Djibouti was seventh with 522,738,  Somalia with 375,596, Burundi with 209,233 and Eritrea with 11,348.

These figures coincide with TNS latest research which shows that mobile activity is stronger in countries where 3G was deployed earlier. The TNS report will be made public on March 29 2011.
Additional data from admob showed that Nokia was the leading handset manufacturer in Kenya though its market share had reduced from 64% in September 2010 to 57% in February 2011. Responding through Twitter, Kenneth Oyolla, Nokia General Manager for East and Southern Africa said the drop in market share was due to a supply issues caused by a component shortage in its phone factories in the fourth quarter.
In the same period, Samsung increased market share from 12.5% to 13% , MAUI (a smart-phone operating system used on MediaTek based devices [Chinese Handsets])dropped from 9.3% to 6% while Android based devices made an entrance in the top 10 devices to displace Sony Ericsson at fourth position with 4% share. Sony Ericsson dropped to fifth position though market share increased from 3.3% to 4%. Alcatel rose one position higher to hold sixth position while increasing market share from 0.8% to 3%.
Huawei made an entrance into the top 10 to settle at 7^th position with 3% market share. Apple held the 8^th position increasing market share from 0.7% to 2% while Motorola dropped from 5th position to bump ZTE off the 9th position. Motorola market share dropped a percentage to stand at 2% while ZTE previously had 0.6% share. LG also dropped from previously held 6th position with 0.8% share to come displace RIM (Research in Motion[Blackberry]) off the 10th position. However LG managed to increase their market share from 0.8% to 1% while RIM had previously accounted for 0.3% of the market share.
Top 10 handsets in September 2010 were Nokia 1680c, MAUI Based, Nokia 5130, Nokia 2330 Classic, Nokia 2600c, Nokia 3110c, Nokia N2700 Classic, Nokia 2630, Nokia 6300, Nokia 2680 and Samsung SGH-C 160.  In February 2011, Nokia 1680c still held the first position while the Nokia 2330 Classic had risen to second position and the Nokia 5130 was still holding the third position. Others were Opera Mini 4 (handset model not determined from browser) , Alcatel OT 305, Nokia N2700 Classic, Huawei U8150 (IDEOS), Nokia 3110c, Nokia 2600c and Nokia 2730 Classic respectively.
Smartphone share in February 2010 was led by the iPhone with 45%, Blackberry at 23% , Windows based smartphones at 17% , Android based devices at 12% and iPads at 3%.  February 2011 saw Android holding the top position with 69% relegating iPhone to second position at 17% and RIM OS (Blackberry) to 3^rd position with 7%. iPads and Windows OS based phones account for 4% and 3% respectively.
According to statistics from Google Mobile, top searches in Kenya were Football (Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal), Mobile Content (ringtones), Music (Rihanna and Britney Spears), Finance (scholarships, life insurance), Life (Love, HIV) and Cars (Toyota, LandRover).
From a survey carried out in East Africa and presented by Brett, respondents who used mobile Internet comprised of 82% male and 18% female. 61% of female respondents were aged between 18 - 24 years, 26% 25 - 34 years, 9% 35 - 49 years, 1% for 50 years and above, and 3% were below the age of 18. Male respondents by age were 15% for 18 - 24 years old, 33% for 25 - 24, 9% for 35 - 49, 1% for 50 years and above and 5% for 0 -17 years.
39% of the respondents owned a phone and did not own a television. 62% owned a phone and did not own a computer. 78% accessed internet on their phones only while the rest accessed it on both a phone and computer. 80% of respondents accessed the Internet on their phones daily while 12% accessed mobile internet for 3 times a week or less. 8% accessed the Internet on their phones more than 4 times a week but not daily. 73% of respondents said that they clicked on mobile ads.
Businesses in Kenya are still grappling for a viable mobile business model. Mbugua Njihia, CEO of Symbiotic, says that the cascading revenue model of SMS that sees mobile operators bagging about 50% of revenue and premium rate service providers bagging 40% of the balance is not effective. While Safaricom, the dominant mobile money service provider with MPESA issues business bill numbers for free and trains businesses in their use, most businesses lack the knowledge on how to integrate the system into their business applications.
Njihia says that some businesses have resorted to employing interns to manually populate their ERPs with data from mobile payment systems. This is further compounded by the lack of an application programming interface (API) on Vodafone owned MPESA.
Other ‘last mile’ challenges are that the cost of the transaction is wholly borne by the consumer, ideally, Njihia recommends a model where the business either shares the cost or absorbs the cost, which is currently hard to implement. East Africa lacks a physical addressing system, a challenge to physical delivery of electronically purchased goods. Businesses are not to escape blame with most of them treating electronic payments as a separate supplementary channel rather than a part of their core business.
Candy Goodman, Managing director of Mobitainment anticipates that Kenya will go through the same mobile cycle that South Africa underwent. In both countries, cell phones have the highest household reach in both countries. Goodman says that we can apply the lessons learned from South Africa in Kenya. According to the MD, Nokia and Samsung account for 83% of handsets in Africa.
Coming in the riddle form of the egg before the chicken, banks have presented serious challenges to early implementers of electronic commerce like Symbiotic’s own Moca service. Njihia says that banks demand sufficient user base before allowing such systems to plug into their switches, an approach which Terry Murphy, general manager of MMA South Africa, termed as ‘Stupid.’
Mara and Friends was a case study of a Campaign run by Mobitainment for South African flour manufacturer Sasko. The campaign was based round a TV show run by Mara which invited celebrities and baked for them. At the end of the show, Mara asked viewers to send an SMS with their physical address and they would receive a free recipe booklet. The campaign received 18,000 replies in a month.
Another campaign run by Mobitainment for Surf detergent in South Africa. Those who bought a pack send in a ‘Please Call Me” and they would receive an interactive voice response(IVR) call in their local language. The campaign had more than 8,000 entries daily.
Praekelt consulting runs its mobile campaigns around behaviour change and is in charge of the successful beer campaign, Guiness VIP which is a sports based social network in Nigeria. Guiness VIP is however integrated into the popular social networks. Gustav Preekelt, CEO Praekelt consulting says that though Africa is a hotbed for mobile innovation listing Ushahidi, MPESA and Please Call Me as some examples, services in the continent are still expensive.