The growth of mobile data – an even more powerful economic tool than simple voice services – also hinges on authorities allocating sufficient spectrum, said Mortimer Hope, the Africa director of GSMA.

“We expect data to keep growing dramatically, and to facilitate that you need more spectrum to handle that data growth,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Africa in Cape Town.

To unleash the full potential of mobile Internet services, he said, governments should also consider cutting taxes on web-enabled handsets to make them more affordable to consumers on the poorest continent.

At the moment about 15 percent of Africans have access to the Internet via their mobile phones.

“It’s very early days for data but we would like it be everywhere you have voice. The extra physical infrastructure deployment is not as big as you would think.”

Mobile phones have been one of the factors behind Africa’s recent growth spurt, by freeing people from the shackles of the continent’s awful landline infrastructure and allowing them to communicate and transact at minimal personal and financial cost.

The simple SMS – and more recently mobile social media – have also become powerful political tools, used by grassroots political movements to mobilize support against oppressive states, such as happened in the north African ‘Arab Spring’.

Governments across the continent are aware of the economic potential of mobile telephony but are sometimes slow to implement the legal frameworks needed to allow phone companies to expand, Mortimer said.

“Many governments across Africa have developed broadband plans. The issue is that those plans very often just sit on a shelf, not being implemented,” he said.

Africa’s biggest mobile phone company is Johannesburg-based MTN. Other major operators are South Africa’s Vodacom and France’s Orange.

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Africa has a growing young population that is increasingly tech savvy and urbanized. This is attracting foreign sellers of consumer products like smartphones, especially as markets stagnate or shrink in more developed nations.

Although smartphones are gaining popularity across the continent, they are still a novelty. At the end of 2012, sub-Saharan smartphone penetration was four per cent, compared with a global average of 17 per cent, according to industry body GSMA.

“Samsung this year will ship 50 per cent of all the smartphones in Africa,” Thabiet Allie, head of content and services for Samsung Electronics Africa, told a telecoms conference in Cape Town late on Tuesday.

Out of the 100 million or so mobile phones sold in Africa this year, 20 million are smartphones and slightly more than half of those are models made by the South Korean company, he said.

“Next year we are looking at doubling this number and the year after probably doing a substantial increase,” Allie said at the annual AfricaCom conference.

GSMA forecasts smartphones will constitute 20 percent of the Africa market by 2017 as devices priced at below $50 become a reality.

Smartphone use in South Africa is already slightly above the global average, with Blackberry a market leader.

One South African company plans to start assembling a $260 smartphone for the African market in 2014.

The post Samsung to double Africa’s smartphone sales in 2014 appeared first on New Mail Nigeria.