Chinese technology company Huawei may be best known in the west for its hardware, but it’s also gearing up to launch a music-streaming service in South Africa.
Huawei Music will launch this year, with a catalogue initially made up of 80% South African music, with plans to add international content later.
According to local news site Tech Central, at the launch event Huawei said that in China, Huawei Music has 32 million daily active users playing 3.6bn songs a month.
The South African launch is part of a bigger push for Huawai in the country around its cloud services, including the debut of an Android app store, cloud-storage service; and advertising and mobile payments platforms.
The news comes shortly after Spotify launched in South Africa. As we reported in our recent country profile, music-streaming revenues in South Africa rose 334.2% in 2016, with local sources suggesting that they may have more-than doubled again in 2017.
PwC’s recent Entertainment & Media Outlook 2017 report predicts that music-streaming revenue in South Africa will increase at a CAGR of 34.5% to 2021, reaching 518m rand ($44.45m) in that year. More competition in the market, including Huawei, could drive that higher.
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