US$37million spent on gaming in Ghana - Report

An e-commerce and social media analytics report has revealed, US$37 million was spent on video gaming last year in Ghana.

E-commerce expert, Maximus Ametorgoh, Digital Expert at PopOut, who made the disclosure on the Citi Bizness Festival on Monday June 8, 2020, said the firm did a categorization of e-commerce expenditure in the country and came up with the figure.

"According to research done, I wasn't quite shocked at the figure because people have been buying video game consoles, buying points for games as well as data for video gaming," he said.

Maximus Ametorgoh reiterated the numbers did not come as a surprise stating that the right opportunity was created digitally.

Meanwhile, following the COVID-19 pandemic, many have resorted to online franchising and purchasing to rake in some sales and make more money.

Ametorgoh however encouraged entrepreneurs to take advantage of the digital space and tweak it to provide better leverage to their business in this era.

He added, “So companies that understand their audiences and their markets must create the right market opportunities and tap into people’s pockets to make money.”

Additionally, telecommunications giant, MTN Ghana earlier in March this year said following the ban on social and public gatherings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its data and voice services had witnessed a significant spike.

According to Selorm Adadevoh, Chief Executive of MTN Ghana, “So far, it’s been a gradual change and so today the biggest change we’ve seen are students who’ve now all moved home and are working remotely so we’ve seen a spike of that for different services, we’ve also seen Facebook and Netflix traffic also increase significantly and these are some of the very high volumes that we see. We have also seen YouTube also increase and of course the educational sites as well,” he said on Citi’s Breakfast Show on Monday, March 23.

“Every day there’s a change and it depends on what’s happening but somewhere between 15-20 percent will be a fair estimate of the increase,” he added.