How Tim Cook grew Apple into a $4 trillion company
How big is Apple’s business in Africa?
Why Apple has no store in Africa
How limited is Apple Pay’s reach in Africa?
How Africans actually buy Apple products
What Apple left unfinished in Africa
When Tim Cook took over Apple in 2011, the company was worth about $350 billion. When the tech giant announced his transition to executive chairman in April, its market value had climbed to roughly $4 trillion, while annual revenue had nearly quadrupled.
Apple now has more than 2.5 billion active devices and operates more than 500 stores globally. None of those stores are in Africa.
That is the oddity confronting John Ternus as he took over as Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday. He inherits a company that grew faster than almost any business in history and a continent where Apple’s presence shows up in your pocket but barely shows up in Apple’s own numbers.
Cook did not build this growth on the iPhone alone, though the iPhone still drives half of Apple’s revenue. In fiscal 2025, iPhone sales brought in $209.59 billion, more than 50% of total revenue.
Four things changed under Cook:
Apple does not break out its African business in its financial reports. The company groups Africa with Europe, India and the Middle East, a region that generated $111.03 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025.
Other data offers clues, though not a complete picture. Statcounter estimates that Apple devices accounted for 18.57% of mobile web usage across Africa in August 2026. The share varies sharply by market: 31.97% in Ghana, 24.82% in South Africa, 17.92% in Nigeria, and about 6.8% in Kenya.
Those numbers measure web usage rather than sales, but they reveal how deeply Apple devices have penetrated some African markets. The picture looks different when you examine new smartphone shipments.
Apple did not rank among Omdia’s five largest smartphone vendors in Africa in the first quarter of 2026. Transsion, the Chinese company behind Tecno, Infinix and itel, accounted for 47% of shipments, reflecting the dominance of cheaper devices in a market where most consumers buy phones below $150.
Apple has a sizeable installed base in parts of Africa, but relatively little of that presence comes from selling new phones through an Apple-controlled distribution network. Many iPhones change hands through resellers, imports and the continent’s large secondhand market.
In Africa, then, Apple’s footprint is bigger than its sales disclosures suggest, but much harder to measure.
Apple has opened hundreds of stores globally during Tim Cook’s tenure, more than doubling the number of countries where it operates physical retail locations. Not a single one of Apple’s more than 500 stores is on the continent.
If you buy Apple products in Nigeria, Kenya, or South Africa, you are buying from an authorised reseller, not from Apple directly. Companies like iStore in South Africa, or Salute iWorld in Kenya, handle sales, pricing, financing, and support on Apple’s behalf.
That arrangement lets Apple reach African customers without paying for the buildings, staff, and inventory that a company-owned store needs. But it also leaves much of the customer relationship in the hands of other companies:
South Africa has perhaps the closest thing to an Apple retail ecosystem on the continent. iStore has built out a network that covers much of what consumers would expect from an Apple-owned operation, including trade-ins and certified pre-owned products.
In 2023, TechCabal asked why Apple had not built a stronger African retail presence. That question still has no clear answer more than a decade later.
As of August 2026, Apple Pay works in just four African countries: Egypt, Mauritius, Morocco, and South Africa
South Africa was first, launching in March 2021. Morocco followed in 2023, Egypt in December 2024, and Mauritius in May 2026. That is a slow rollout for a payment service that has existed globally since 2014.
Apple also launched Tap to Pay on iPhone in South Africa in May 2026, working with the local fintech Yoco. This lets merchants accept contactless payments through their iPhone without buying a separate card machine. It is the strongest example so far of Apple building something specifically for an African market.
Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, three of the continent’s biggest smartphone markets, still have no Apple Pay. In most African countries, Apple Account payments also run mainly through cards, even though many people prefer mobile money or direct bank transfers.
For many African consumers, buying an iPhone does not mean buying directly from Apple. The devices reach them through authorised resellers, independent phone dealers, online marketplaces, imports and a large secondhand market.
Price is the biggest driver. Omdia says Africa’s most common smartphone price band sits below $150. The base iPhone 17, in comparison, launched globally at $799. In September 2025, TechCabal calculated that a Nigerian minimum-wage earner would need about 17 months of full wages to afford that phone.
That price gap has created a market for older iPhones. TechCabal’s reporting on Nigeria’s used-iPhone trade in 2022 found a large market built around buyers who wanted an Apple device but could not afford a new one. In South Africa, iStore has leaned further into this by expanding certified pre-owned sales, which Chris Dodd, CEO of iStore South Africa, called an important growth area.
Apple earns nothing directly when a used iPhone changes hands between two strangers. But the new owner still becomes a Services customer, paying for iCloud storage, App Store purchases, or Apple Music.
Apple does not disclose how many African users enter its ecosystem this way, or how much revenue they generate. But the market helps explain how Apple can have a sizeable installed base in Africa despite selling relatively few new smartphones on the continent.
Four gaps stand out from everything above:
Direct retail.
An Apple-owned store would give the company control over pricing, trade-ins, repairs, and customer data that resellers currently hold.
Payment coverage.
Apple Pay’s four-country footprint leaves out Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, some of Apple’s biggest African markets by usage. Deeper links to mobile money and bank transfers, not just cards, would close a real gap.
A formal pre-owned system.
The demand for used iPhones already exists across the continent. Apple and its partners could expand certified devices, transparent battery grading, and trade-in programmes to bring more of that trade into a trusted system.
Disclosure:
Apple could disclose revenue, device numbers or developer earnings for the continent without changing its existing geographic segments. Until it does, there is no reliable way to tell whether Apple’s business in Africa is growing, shrinking or simply being sustained by the devices already in circulation.
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