Africa’s smartphone market recovered from two consecutive quarters of declines to record sequential growth of 4.4 per cent in Q3 2017, spurred by ongoing economic recoveries in some of the region’s major markets, IDC announced.

While the 21.7 million units shipped was down 5.5 per cent year-on-year, this still marks an improvement over the performance in previous quarters.

In the feature phone space, shipments of 33.7 million units were down 3.6 per cent quarter-on-quarter after increasing for the three previous periods. But year-on-year, the feature phone market was up 11.5 per cent.

Feature phones still make up the lion’s share of the African market (60.8 per cent), as they “adequately address the needs of African consumers that have limited purchasing power and require a reliable long-lasting mode of communication, particularly those in rural areas”, IDC said.

Total mobile phone shipments of 55.4 million units was a slight quarter-on-quarter decrease of 0.7 per cent and up 4.2 per cent year-on-year.

Africa’s two biggest markets – Nigeria and South Africa – registered notably different performances, with an increase of 1.7 per cent quarter-on-quarter for the former and a decline of 8 per cent for the latter.

In terms of vendors, brands owned by Transsion continued to lead the smartphone category with a 30.1 per cent share, followed by Samsung on 26.1 per cent. Transsion benefited from “aggressive sales and marketing campaigns, and by designing devices that address the specific needs of each local market”, said Nabila Popal, senior research manager at IDC.

4G phones are growing in popularity, with shipments increasing 5.5 per cent to finally account for a majority share of the smartphone market (52.9 per cent). A drop in prices for entry-level 4G phones and an increase in the number of 4G networks were behind the growth.