The KPMG Global Africa Practice has unveiled its Africa Business Guide App, which provides country-specific business information to potential investors.
The app offers country profiles featuring up-to-date fiscal guides, news aggregation and KPMG insights like surveys and reports across various industries. It also gives users "quick links" to KPMG subject experts across various markets and sectors.
"The waters can be difficult to navigate, but we are committed to helping clients and potential clients capture business opportunities available in the African market, understand the landscape and mitigate the risks," says Seyi Bickersteth, chairman of KPMG Africa.
Jelena Kucan Salic, market expansion manager of Africa high-growth markets at KPMG, calls the African continent a "high-growth market" into which many companies are considering expanding their businesses.
"The reason many companies still treat Africa as one place, aside from naivet'e, has to do with company strategy," says Will Hahn, principal analyst of CSP strategies at Gartner.
Hahn adds a "global strategy" by which giant corporates - often "soft" services like social networks - offer the same product across an entire continental region with little investment in country-specific refinement or support. While this strategy is cost- and time-efficient, Hahn says, it leaves gaps for local providers to offer a product better tailored to the country's specific needs and constraints.
Hahn believes a second strategy, by which companies commit to each national market individually, giving significant latitude to country managers to offer services in the way best-suited to local conditions, is needed. While this strategy is more costly, in the long term, it yields the benefits of offering a better product for each specific region, he says.
"An app that helps with this kind of country-level detail would be of interest to companies pursuing an Africa strategy," says Hahn.
"People cannot view Africa as one business landscape. In the app and its content, this comes through obviously and strongly," says Kucan Salic.
The KPMG Africa Business App is free to download and use, and is available globally.
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