Ericsson Mobility Report: African mobile subscriptions reach 880 million

The report states that one of the main reasons for this rapid growth in smartphone subscriptions is that "subscribers in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa are exchanging their basic phones for smartphones. This is partly due to the increased availability of lower cost smartphones."

According to the report, "the number of subscriptions exceeds the population in many countries, primarily because not all subscriptions are active, but also because subscribers may have multiple devices - e.g. for business and private use, or to optimize pricing by using different operators for different calls (this is common in parts of Africa). In developed markets users add secondary devices such as tablets. This means that the number of subscribers is lower than the number of subscriptions - the current figures are around 4.6 billion subscribers versus 6.9 billion subscriptions.

"In the future there will be regional differences - for example smartphone subscriptions in Europe will reach around 95% by 2020, while in the Middle East penetration will be 55%."

For more, download the full Ericsson Mobility Report November 2014.