In sub-Saharan Africa, 5G adoption rate will increase from 0.2% in 2022 to 17% in 2030: report
November 24th 2023
The report highlights that 5G should benefit most sectors of economic activity, even if the majority of the benefits expected by the end of the decade will be concentrated in the manufacturing and services, which have a high capacity for integrating use cases of this technology.
Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to have 226 million subscriptions to fifth generation (5G) mobile networks in 2030, an adoption rate of 17% compared to just 0.2% in 2022, according to a report published on 17 last October by the Global Association of Mobile Telephone Operators and Manufacturers (GSMA).
Titled “The Mobile Economy Sub-Saharan Africa 2023” , the report specifies that 27 operators have already launched commercial 5G mobile services in 16 countries in the region.
The deployment of 5G in sub-Saharan Africa should however be done in stages, starting with areas where the demand for associated services is highest such as densely populated cities, before expanding to other territories as the economic profitability of the technology will improve.
Operators active in the region have stepped up their efforts to modernize and prepare their networks for 5G, with a focus on the deployment of optical fiber for backhaul, as well as network automation and virtualization solutions for manage costs. However, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) will be a primary use case for 5G in the region, given the growing demand for connectivity and the limited capacity of connectivity infrastructure. by optical fiber.
Compared to other regions of the world, the growth of 5G south of the Sahara will, in short, be slow but steady, while a growing share of operators’ customers will continue to migrate to 4G, the number of which Subscriptions are expected to almost double to 49% of total connections by the end of the current decade. At the same time, the number of 2G and 3G connections will drop to 2% and 33% respectively in 2030.
Industry and services, main beneficiaries of 5G
The report also highlights that 5G mobile networks are expected to represent, across their entire value chain, an economic contribution of $11 billion in sub-Saharan Africa in 2030, compared to less than a billion in 2022. While several Countries in the region are still in the early stages of deploying these networks, the economic benefits of 5G will increase as the technology becomes widely adopted.
5G is expected to benefit most sectors of the economy in sub-Saharan Africa, depending on their ability to integrate the use cases of this technology into their operations. By 2030, however, 32% of the economic impact should concern the manufacturing industry sector, thanks to applications such as smart factories and cities, and 29% the services sector (public administration, financial services, health, education).
The GSMA also indicates that the contribution of mobile telephony, all generations combined, to economic added value in sub-Saharan Africa should reach around $210 billion in 2030 compared to $170 billion in 2022, thanks in particular to productivity gains. and efficiency resulting from the increased use of mobile services. This increase in the economic contribution of mobile telephony will mainly result from the increase in 4G and 5G subscriptions.
At the regional level, the total number of subscriptions to mobile telephone networks (total SIM connections) is expected to reach 1.36 billion in 2030 compared to 980 million in 2022, while the number of unique subscribers to mobile telephone networks will increase from 489 million in 2022 to 692 million in 2030.
The mobile telephony penetration rate in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to reach 50% in 2030 compared to 43% in 2022.
Furthermore, the adoption rate of smartphones in the region will reach 88% (1.2 billion smartphone connections) at the end of the current decade compared to 51% in 2022, thanks in particular to improved financial accessibility. of these devices.
Source: Agence Ecofin Back