10 slides that tell you everything you need to know about the South African digital landscape

Ask someone to list the world’s most connected countries and they’ll most likely rattle off names like South Korea, China and — if they’re unaware of the vagaries of cable companies in that country — the US. One country they’re fairly unlikely to mention is South Africa. That sort of makes sense too. After all, the country’s average broadband speed is just 3.6Mbps. That’s significantly slower than the 4.5Mbps global average and a veritable snail’s pace compared with the 25.3Mbps average speed South Korea currently enjoys.

That only tells part of the story though. Look a little closer and you’ll see that slow internet speeds aren’t stopping people from connecting.

The latest report from We Are Social for instance shows that the South Africa has 79.1-million mobile connections, meaning that there are nearly one and a half connections for every person in the country.

Internet connectivity also grew 24% in the last year, outpacing the rate of global internet growth by around three percent and mobile is eating up an increasingly large portion of the internet access pie, with some 61% of the country’s web page views coming from mobile phones.

Read more: 16 graphs that shed new light on the South African smartphone space

We’ve isolated 10 slides from the London-based social media’s research in order to give you a comprehensive view of South Africa’s digital landscape.

1. Digital in South Africa

While South Africa does have an inordinately high number of mobile connections, there’s still plenty of room for growth when it comes to internet connectivity. Less than half the population uses the internet on an active basis. Only around 12-million people are active on social media meanwhile and just 10.6-million have mobile social accounts.

2. Annual growth

The rate of growth across all those categories is however promising.

3. Time spent online

The South Africans who are online also spend significantly more time online than their Chinese counterparts.

4. Internet use

Despite South Africa’s high number of internet connections, only around 39% of the country’s population are active internet users. As low-end smartphones start to flood the market however, it seems likely that this number will only grow.

Read more: Social media and smartphones in South Africa: by the numbers [Infographic]

5. Share of web traffic

As smartphones become cheaper, you can expect mobile’s already high proportion of web traffic to grow even larger. The fact that desktop traffic has shrunk year on year is a sign that this is already happening.

6. Mobile and social

Interestingly, the proportion of the population with social and mobile social accounts remains a fair bit lower than those accessing the internet via mobile.

7. WhatsApp is a winner

WhatsApp is far and away the dominant player in the social space, followed by Facebook and fellow Facebook stablemate Facebook Messenger. Interestingly, Mxit — which once dominated the country’s mobile messaging space — doesn’t even feature in the research.

8. Prepaid is still dominant

The fact that prepaid is still so dominant in South Africa, the country that did the most to pioneer it, shows just how good an idea it was. With just 17% of connections post-paid and connection rates falling all the time, the networks may however be ruing the fact that they didn’t manage to get more of the population signing contracts. It’s also clear that the country has a long way to go when it comes to mobile broadband, given that just 36% of connections are 3G and 4G.

9. What people use their mobile phones for

Social media and mobile video dominate. Interestingly, mobile banking is right up there too.

10. Ecommerce

South Africa has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world. Given the price disparity between mobile and desktops (with a fixed line connection), it should therefore hardly be surprising that the number of people who claim to have bought something online using a PC is more than double the number of people who’ve bought using mobile.

Read more: South Africa’s cashless future relies on localisation, not innovation

To see how South Africa compares with the rest of the world, check out the rest of the slide deck:

Digital, Social & Mobile in 2015 from We Are Social Singapore