Why is South Africa Zoho's third fastest growing market?

South Africa now The market is the third fastest growing in Zoho's top 15, according to Andrew Bourne, regional head of Southern Africa for the Indian business software company.

That's because he said in an interview with TechCentral on Thursday. joho Prices are in rands rather than dollars, and it has quietly built up South African localization over the past several years, causing no trouble to most of its global software-as-a-service (SaaS) competitors.

The dollar-denominated SaaS stack is becoming a heavy burden on the South African IT budget. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and many other tools on which modern South African businesses run are often billed in dollars, meaning the cost of operations increases with every step up in rand.

“Cost is a big factor,” Bourne said. He attributes the company's recent South African growth to companies that discovered large price differentials compared to competitors. The Zoho One bundle, launched in 2017, gives customers access to more than 50 of the company's more than 60 business applications for a per-employee fee.

Analyst houses rank Zoho below the global leaders. Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation PlatformZoho was named a Visionary for the fourth time – and recognized by Gartner for the 15th consecutive year – but the Leaders Quadrant remains the preserve of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle, as it has for many years.

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Zoho is a niche player from Gartner 2025 Customer Engagement Center Quadrant And the only challenger in 2024 B2B Marketing Automation Quadrant. Zoho's pitch – and Bourne's – is that those rivals don't price in local currency.

What is less visible, but perhaps equally important to Zoho's South African growth, is the localization work. The company is currently integrating Zoho Books with the South African Revenue Service's e-filing system so that VAT returns can be submitted directly from the accounting application. It has also built integration with several payment gateways in the country.

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Zoho's South African workforce numbers approximately 45 employees across offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The company also has offices in Mauritius, Nairobi, Lagos and Cairo and is also expanding into adjacent African markets.

The company behind all this is unusual by global SaaS standards. Zoho was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu, a Princeton University-trained electrical engineer who, along with his brothers and co-founder Tony Thomas, started his career at Qualcomm in San Diego.

It was originally called AdventNet, a network management software developer, and changed its name to Zoho Corporation in 2009 as the SaaS suite outgrew the core business. Zoho posted revenue of US$1 billion in the year ending March 31, 2023. It never raised venture capital, was never publicly listed, and Vembu has consistently dismissed speculation about an initial public offering, preferring to remain private.

In January 2025, Vembu stepped down from the role of chief executive and now serves as the company's chief scientist, focusing on R&D – particularly its AI work – and its rural development projects. Co-founder Shailesh Kumar Davy takes over as group CEO. Vembu's brother Mani runs the Zoho.com division, which houses the SaaS application suite for which the company is best known.

Corporate culture flows from the founder. Bourne said that even the founders fly economy class and the company refuses acquisitions in favor of building everything in-house.

“You won't see us putting our logo on a Formula 1 car,” he said. The same austerity extends to Zoho School of Learning, an in-house program that recruits rural Indian school leavers without university degrees, trains them, and guarantees them a job with a stipend paid during training. Bourne said he would like to see this model replicated in South Africa as it contributes to the country's structural unemployment.

The most visible difference in Zoho's South African footprint remains the local data centres. South African customers are currently hosted in the company's US or European data centers – Zoho says both comply with the Personal Information Protection Act – but that's not always enough for some banking and sensitive sector customers.

data center

Bourne said a South African data center is on the road map, with Teraco also one of the co-location partners under discussion, but the timeline has slipped. “I would like it to be done next year, but it looks like it will be done in 2028,” he said, citing global server and memory price volatility.

Of course, this delay matters less to small and medium enterprises – a market segment tired of paying in dollars for software. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media