The market for fleet management in South Africa is in a growth period which will continue in the years to come, says market research firm Berg Insight.

The number of fleet management systems in active use is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.8% from 0.9 million units in 2015 to 1.5 million by 2020. Non-privately owned fleet vehicles used by businesses are also estimated to increase from 21.5% in 2015 to 32.5% in 2020.

“South Africa is a relatively mature telematics market and the penetration is comparably high from an international perspective, Berg Insight says. “Far from all deployments are however full-scale advanced fleet management solutions.”

The research company said a large number of the installed fleet telematics systems in South Africa’s market are represented by “comparably low-end tracking systems” such as light fleet management solutions which includes SVR systems that are extended with basic fleet management features.

Berg Insight said that the local market is dominated by five players with broad telematics portfolios which are all headquartered in the country and have installed bases of more than 100,000 fleet management units.

It ranked Cartrack in second place, followed by Altech Netstar and DigiCore (Ctrack).

“Tracker has also provided more than 100,000 active FM systems in the country, out of which a share is represented by solutions powered by TomTom Telematics,” Berg Insight said. “Other renowned international providers active on the market include Pointer Telocation and Geotab.”

However, the company added that foreign telematics players have “generally not managed to achieve any significant market shares on the South African fleet management market so far”. It cited additional examples of domestic aftermarket players as GPS Tracking Solutions (Eqstra Fleet Management), Global Telematics (Pointer SA), Autotrak, ACM Track and Digit Vehicle Tracking.

It also noted that original equipment manufacturers of commercial vehicle such as Daimler, Scania, Volvo Group and MAN had also introduced fleet telematics solutions in South Africa, though the adoption levels were generally “relatively modest so far”.