Nokia and Facebook dominate the UAE mobile market
At the end of last week, we took a look at the fact that
smartphones are outselling feature phones worldwide.
In the Arab world, smartphones might not surpass features phones
until 2016, but the UAE will be one of the first markets where
it makes this switch.
Last week, it was hard to find recent data on the prevalence of
smartphones in the UAE, but yesterday, the Telecommunications
Regulatory Authority released
their second quarter findings on smartphones and mobile
operating systems.
Here’s a look at the findings:
Nokia is still dominant in the market, with 56.4%
market share, while Samsung, at 13.8%, has surpassed Blackberry
(10.7%)
since 2012. Apple trails at 7.4%.
Overall smartphone penetration is at 44%, the TRA says, a statistic
that conflicts with Google’s estimation that rates are closer to 62%. Regardless, TRA says
that the Samsung SIII is the most popular smartphone, followed by
the iPhone 4, the iPhone 5, and the Blackberry Bold 9900.
Symbian remains the market’s most popular OS, at
38%, despite the fact that Nokia dumped Symbian from its smartphone
line, replacing it with Windows OS; the enduring popularity of
Nokia feature phones likely keeps Symbian in the lead.
Blackberry comes in second, at 23%, followed by Android (21%), and
Apple (16%). As we mentioned, Android dominates the regional market
with a 40% share, and will likely eventually dominate the UAE
smartphone market as well, depending how Blackberry fares once it
finds a buyer.
Here’s a stat that might intrigue music streaming services like Anghami, Deezer, and Yala Music: use of iTunes accounted for 92% of total visits to application websites. Users in the UAE are craving- and paying for- music. [UPDATE: while Anghami confirms that indeed, 70% of their paid traffic comes from iTunes, the fact that only 8% of iTunes use in the UAE would come from Blackberry, Android, and Nokia combined doesn't make sense. In general, the platform has 30% more users on Android than iPhone, it founders confirmed.]
When it comes to social media, startups looking to advertise
on mobile may want to note that UAE mobile users love
Facebook. The social network that was just
politely hacked by an adept Palestinian white hat accounted for
87% of the total visits to all social networking websites from
April through June this year.
Twitter ranks a distant second, accounting for 11% of the total
visits, followed by LinkedIn (1.8%), which is trying
to expand in the region, and Maktoob and MySpace trailing with
less than 1% of all visits to social networks via mobile.
The TRA reports that mobile internet penetration sits at
73%, a stat
previously debuted by market research organization TNS Mena;
this puts the UAE above the regional and global averages of 41% and
51%, and according to a
2013 ITU study, on par with developed markets, which average
75%.