Most popular smartphone brands in South Africa

Samsung continues to be the most popular smartphone brand in South Africa, but the battle for runner-up has become a much more heated affair than in previous years.

That is according to the latest available data from GlobalStats Statcounter on the most popular mobile vendors in South Africa.

The data analytics company uses over 5 billion monthly page views of around 1.5 million websites to determine the leading brands and vendors in various industries and regions.

Its most recent analyses showed that Samsung smartphones accounted for 49.07% of views in the mobile vendor segment in South Africa in January 2023. That represented a slight increase of 48.04% from the year before.

Samsung South Africa offers a wide range of smartphones across the three major pricing segments — entry-level, mid-range, and flagship — and provides extensive local customer support.

The company also offers some of the longest software support periods for an Android manufacturer, and it has one of the best trade-in programmes in South Africa.

If customers buy its latest flagship, Samsung gives up to R5,000 discount when they swap in one of several older premium smartphones. These include Samsung Galaxy and major rival devices.

Although Samsung offers some impressive flagship smartphones, the company’s true strength lies in its mid-rangers that provide a good balance of performance, affordability, and software support.

The Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is considered one of the best mid-range smartphones on the market

South Africa’s second most popular smartphone brand — Huawei — saw a substantial decline from 24.61% to 19.12% between January 2022 and January 2023.

The company’s popularity has dropped in South Africa each year since it lost access to Google Mobile Services (GMS).

Its 5.49 percentage point drop in the past year is nearly fully accounted for when combining the gains of its rivals in the top 5.

Apple saw the most significant increase in popularity — climbing from 15.89% to 17.77% — which means it is breathing down Huawei’s neck.

If the trend continues this year, Apple will surpass Huawei as the second-most popular smartphone brand in South Africa.

This will be quite a feat considering that it only truly caters to the higher-end market, which is a smaller segment locally than in developed countries like the US and UK.

Editorial credit: ms_pics_and_more / Shutterstock.com

With a decline from 2.18% in January 2022 to 1.93% in January 2023, Nokia has fallen out of the top 5 most popular smartphone brands in South Africa.

It was surpassed by two rapidly-growing Chinese rivals — Xiaomi and Oppo — who accounted for 2.80% and 2.54% of the market share as measured by StatCounter.

Some former Huawei customers may have moved to these brands when searching for devices with Google Mobile Services that compete with Samsung on price.

The table and chart below compare the market share of South Africa’s biggest smartphone brands, based on data from StatCounter.

While Huawei’s popularity has declined substantially in South Africa in the past year, it has remained remarkably robust compared to its performance in other markets.

Globally, Huawei fell out of the top 5 in terms of smartphone sales in early 2021.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), 2022 was a rough year for the smartphone industry in general, with an 11.3% decline across the market.

But relative to each other, many brands remained in similar positions compared to previous years.

Samsung captured 21.6% of sales in 2022, followed by Apple with 18.8%.

While Apple’s global figure closely correlates with its popularity in South Africa, Samsung has a substantially smaller global market share than in South Africa.

One major contributor could be that the Chinese contenders of Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo have more widespread appeal outside of South Africa.

Together, they accounted for about 34% of the world’s smartphone sales in 2022.

That is likely due to being very popular in highly-populous countries in Asia — like China and India — which rank as the two largest smartphone markets in the world.

In recent years, Xiaomi and Oppo have also shown significant interest in expanding their presence in South Africa.

By using the same tactic as Huawei during its early days — offering powerful devices at highly-competitive prices — they could soon also be taking on Samsung locally, instead of only eating away at Huawei’s lunch.

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