What sector to target for Tablets market in MENA Region?

MENA emerging tablet markets is still forecast to post double-digit growth for 2015 as a whole, while other regions around the world will experience much bigger slowdowns or even declines. Why? Because the consumer segment and specially the youth will remain the major contributor to this growth,
but we also expect to see a huge contribution from the commercial segment in 2015, with education deals being a major driver.

Cultural shifts among the region’s young people have spawned a tremendous creative energy. Untapped demand for local, Arabic content has spurred regional media to grow by leaps and bounds. Accelerated adoption of mobile technology has created opportunity across media platforms. Moreover, evolution in paid and digital media have created new rationales for investment.

However still to remember, MENA region is an especially tough nut to crack for many global brands. Understanding what consumers in the MENA region want from social brands, keeping in mind the cultural diversities, is a completely different challenge than in the US and other western countries. Now when it comes to branding tablets, the most pivotal understanding should concentrate on how regional trends in social media are mixed with these cultural diversities !

Understanding Regional Trends

Some excellent studies have been undertaken about social media usage in the MENA region, but many of them tend to focus on the fact that social media users are much more likely to share their views on politics and community related matters than users in other countries, without providing an insight for marketers for targeting a sector or consumers’ habits. Social media in the Arab world continues to grow exponentially, with over 85 million users in the region. With around 82 million Facebook users and 5.8 million active Twitter

users there are more than 22 percent of the young population who are actively using social media platforms in innovative ways. The usage trends of online social networking should be explored in areas like governance, entrepreneurship promotion and social inclusion. But what should be initially important to us is the role of the younger generation as the target sector and the key benefactor.  

Young tech-savvy population

Social media has also changed information hierarchies and the power balance of knowledge exchange, creating two-way channels of discourse and engaging difficult-to-reach segments of societies in GCC. It has the potential to empower marginalized voices to create, document and disseminate their version of current events. Beyond being used by people in their individual and collective endeavors, social media is also being used by businesses and government institutions who are engaged with citizens.

One important factor to note is the utilization of technologies such as social media in the provision of public services, whether for citizen engagement, innovation, or intergovernmental collaboration does not show a consistent trend among GCC members.

For example UAE tends to be more opt for change due to government participation like recent ‘UAE Brainstorming Session’ via Twitter, that was initiated by Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE to crowd source ideas from the public around healthcare and education issues in the UAE. This should be the leading factor in individual market development for each MENA member country. 

Racha Mourtada, Research Associate with the Governance and Innovation Program said: “Our research shows that social media in the Arab world is dominated by young men under 30, with only 1 in 3 social media users in the region being a woman. Given this “young tech-savvy population” many governments in the Arab world have come to realize the importance of proactively engaging citizens in finding innovative ways of delivering public services that are inclusive, citizen-centric, responsive and cost-effective.

This trend all proves that  engagement through social media for service delivery presents benefits such as increased service accessibility, improved quality of services, inclusiveness and reduced costs and also turning social media as the leading outreach tool for the target sector.

Some key points of application:

• 8 in 10 internet users now have a smartphone and almost half own a tablet. For both devices, figures peak among 25-34s and the top income quartile.
• Three quarters of internet users are now going online via a mobile, while more than a third are connecting via a tablet. However, there are significant segments who own a tablet who are not using them to go online.
• Internet users now spend an average of almost 2 hours daily on the mobile web. This figure is rising sharply in some areas of MENA nearing the 3.5-hour mark – and among 16-24s, who now devote 43% of their total internet time in mobility.

Actionable Insights

The result of above facts and figures will produce actionable insights which optimize decision making across tablet market providing the creative spark for a new advertising campaign, or proper utilization of social median for inbound marketing or a better road maps to measure the impact of new methods of marketing specifically focused on social media campaigns against pre-agreed KPIs.

These data provide regional media players with an opportunity to reset their business models and explore investments in high-quality local content, and offer global players in particular a reason to reevaluate their target demography in the region. To succeed in this evolving landscape, it is important to understand how these changes are effecting three growth areas: gaming, audiovisual content, and e-commerce all inter-related to tablet platforms.

Do not forget! Another area of growth in terms of unit shipments is set to come from the education sector. Many countries across the region have initiatives in place aimed at enhancing the education experience of students through the use of technology, and this includes a number of large tablet projects that are expected to be fulfilled over the next couple of years in countries such as the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, South Africa, and Egypt.

Ultimately, it's clear to see that there are numerous factors currently shaping the dynamics of the tablet industry. And while the MENA market may well look a little different in a couple of years from now, education deals and burgeoning consumer segments specially the younger generation across the region will ensure that sales continue to flourish.