Trouble for Samsung in South Africa

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Honor continued to record impressive performance in South Africa 2025, following enormous gains in the last two years.

The substantial growth suggests the company could be giving the country’s top-selling brand sleepless nights.

Honor recently reaffirmed to Business Times it had the second-highest smartphone market share in the country, with only Samsung posting higher sales.

In 2024, Honor sold more than one million smartphones in South Africa. It has recorded another 70% growth in the year-to-date compared to the same period last year.

Honor South Africa CEO Fred Zhou told Business Times that the company’s success was due to its belief in the local market and its potential.

“We want to continue building brand trust and investing through many partnerships as we grow,” said Zhou.

Among the company’s best-selling devices in the past year has been the Honor X9c, which was released in November 2024.

This R7,500 smartphone makes a strong case in the midrange segment, with features including a massive 6,600mAh battery with three-day usage, 66W charging, 5G support, and 12GB RAM.

While it has an extensive line-up of devices in the budget and midrange segments, it also offers its flagship Magic Pro phones locally.

Honor is a former subsidiary of Huawei but was spun off from the company in 2020. That came in the aftermath of Huawei’s cutoff from Google Mobile Services (GMS).

Huawei’s estimated smartphone market share in South Africa peaked at 30% in late 2020, before its blacklisting over national security concerns, stemming from its close links to the Chinese state.

With South Africans being hesitant to use workarounds to access GMS and Google apps on Huawei phones, sales plummeted over the following years.

While Honor is also closely linked to the Chinese government, with some reports describing its state-backing as “unusually strong,” it does not work in telecommunications networks like Huawei.

Closing in on Samsung’s crown

While websites like GlobalStats, StatCounter, and Statista rank Apple as the second most popular smartphone brand in South Africa, this is not based on actual sales, but on online user traffic.

According to analyses of actual smartphone sales by companies like Canalys and Counterpoint Research, it has not recently featured in the top five brands by shipments.

The reason is simple — Apple does not offer budget smartphones, which make up the bulk of smartphone sales in South Africa.

Samsung offers an extensive selection of budget and mid-range smartphones, while the country’s second-best-selling brands, iTel, Hisense, and Tecno, focus primarily on the ultra-low-end market.

Honor began seeing rapid gains in South Africa in 2023, when Counterpoint Research estimated the company increased its 1% market share to 13% after a whopping 1,000% sales increase.

Honor’s smartphone sales even briefly exceeded Samsung’s in the last quarter of that year. The South Korean tech giant’s market share took a hammering over the entire year, shrinking from 29% to 21%.

Zhou also told What’s Next that Honor achieved 188% year-on-year smartphone sales growth between 2023 and 2024.

While there is currently no publicly available data on South African market shares by shipments in 2024, it seems likely that Xiaomi has closed the gap on Samsung even further.

While Samsung’s South African smartphone sales for 2024 are unknown, the company experienced a slight 1.1% drop globally, according to Canalys Research.

Honor has also recently recorded explosive growth in other markets, including Europe, where its shipments increased 77% in the fourth quarter of 2024.