The Jumia Nigeria, an online retail store says Nigeria’s current internet penetration rate is 53 per cent.
Jumai represented its 2017 report on African Mobile trends study on online marketing with specification on Nigeria.
Mrs Ojuola Asuquo, the Media Officer for Jumai in the report of the African Mobile Trends, on Wednesday said that Nigeria has a much higher penetration rate than across Africa of 18 per cent.
“Nigeria continues its trajectory down the increasingly widening highway that is the mobile internet with a current internet penetration rate of 55 per cent, which is 97.2 million users,’’ she said.
She said that the study examined how the market had democratised mobile internet use, the consumer behaviours driving increased Smartphone adoption and the role of mobile brands.
Other areas are mobile operators and e-commerce in creating a synergy of an enhanced customer experience.
“Nigeria has a much higher penetration rate than across Africa with18 per cent,” she said.
She said that customers who made use of the site with mobile phones, both in items sold and revenue generation continued to be the most popular among Nigerian shoppers on Jumia.
“The sales of Smartphones jumped up by 394 per cent between 2014 and 2016, mostly driven by an increasing range of Smartphones price points.”
She said that in spite of the high cost of data for browsing; mobile customers consisted of 63 per cent of all orders in Nigeria.
She, however, said Nigeria’s mobile trends for 2017 were positive with a steady growth of Smartphones adoption and diversity.
Asuquo said that the increased offerings delivered more value for customers and cheaper access to internet connectivity.
According to her, with the research, development, innovative data packages continued among brands of mobile phone, network.
“The company will look out for an even more synergised digital ecosystem over the next few years.
“This year’s Mobile Africa Study was carried out in 15 African countries which generated more than 80 per cent of Africa’s GDP.
“The countries are Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Mozambique, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Senegal,’’ she said.
Asuquo said that there were 960 million mobile subscriptions across Africa which was 80 per cent penetration rate among the continent’s population.
She said that about 71 per cent of website visitors on Jumia use their mobile phones.
She said that one of the main vehicles of the mobile trajectory was the increasing adoption of the Smartphone device by consumers.
She added that as predicted in the 2016 report, Smartphone adoption continued to rise in Nigeria.
“The sales of Smartphones jumped up by 394 per cent between 2014 and 2016, mostly driven by an increasing range of Smartphones price points,’’ she said.
Accordinf to her, looking at the mobile internet browsers customers use to access Jumia, 50 per cent of customers in Africa come into Jumia’s mobile site with Google Chrome.
“Nigeria’s the number was just 28 per cent. Instead, the Opera mini browser was much more popular with 41 per cent of the mobile traffic to Jumia Nigeria coming from Opera mini.
“One reason for this could be that countries with higher levels of income have been found to have more users accessing the internet with heavier browsers like chrome – which typically have higher system requirements.
“Opera mini is a lighter browser in terms of data usage and is popular among new mobile internet users with lower incomes who cannot afford costly internet data packs,’’ she said.
She said that a recent report from Opera determined the savings on mobile data costs for Opera mini users in Nigeria had amounted to about 198 million dollars over a 10-month period. (NAN)
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