LONG dismissed as a marginal market and sidelined by the world’s major cell phone manufacturers, Sub Saharan Africa has lately become the centre of an intense buzz for mobile handsets business.
And as the battle rages for market share, Uganda is one of the countries witnessing dramatic shifts in their mobile phone markets. And here Motorola is making firm strides-from a relatively insignificant 15 per cent, the company has pursued a wide, energetic push for its brand, slowly chipping away at the stranglehold of its chief rival Nokia to capture 32 per cent of the market.
Mr Richard Tinka, Motorola’s country manager, said the company’s late entry into the Ugandan market – it started a commercial presence here mid last year – and in Africa generally had much to do with the continent’s woeful economic status: impoverished economies with few people capable of affording a largely luxurious item like a mobile phone.
In the last few years though Africans developed an urgent and huge appetite for cell phones, having discovered how vastly life changing their use could be. It was now incumbent on the companies to develop business models that could suit the African conditions – a critical part of which lay in designing handsets cheap enough for Africans to afford.
“The African mobile market has been growing at 70 per cent and that’s really too spectacular for anyone to ignore,” Mr Tinka said.
Upon this reality, Motorola waded into what it had for long disregarded as difficult and unviable markets and the results of their investments have been swift in coming.
Motorolla phones are now the second best sellers in the Ugandan market and at the rate of their current growth, it’s not impossible for them to surpass the market king, Nokia in half a decade.
Source: The Monitor
