Why South Africa is Zoho’s third-fastest-growing market

South Africa now sits as the third-fastest-growing market in Zoho’s top 15, according to Andrew Bourne, the Indian business software company’s regional head for Southern Africa.

This, he said in an interview with TechCentral on Thursday, is because Zoho prices in rand rather than dollars, and it has spent the past several years quietly building South African localisations that most of its global software-as-a-service (SaaS) competitors haven’t bothered with.

The dollar-denominated SaaS stack is becoming a measurably heavier burden on South African IT budgets. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and many of the other tools the modern South African business runs on are often billed in dollars, which means every move lower in the rand raises the cost of operating.

“Cost is a huge factor,” Bourne said. He attributes much of the company’s recent South African growth to companies that discovered a large price gap versus competitors. The Zoho One bundle, launched in 2017, gives subscribers access to more than 50 of the company’s 60-plus business applications for a single per-employee fee.

Analyst houses place Zoho a tier below the global leaders. In Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Zoho was named a Visionary for the fourth time – and recognised by Gartner for the 15th consecutive year – but the Leaders quadrant remained the preserve of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle, as it has been for several years.

Localisation

Zoho is a Niche Player in Gartner’s 2025 Customer Engagement Centre quadrant and the sole Challenger in the 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 probably just as important to Zoho’s South African growth, is the localisation work. The company is currently integrating Zoho Books with the South African Revenue Service’s eFiling system to allow VAT returns to be submitted directly from the accounting application. It has also built integrations with many of the country’s payment gateways.

Read: AI won’t kill SaaS – but it will reshape it, software CEOs say

Zoho’s South African headcount sits at around 45 staff in offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The company also has offices in Mauritius, Nairobi, Lagos and Cairo, and is expanding into adjacent African markets.

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

It was originally called AdventNet, a network management software developer, and was renamed Zoho Corporation in 2009 as the SaaS suite overtook the original business. Zoho passed US$1-billion in revenue in the year ended 31 March 2023. It has never raised venture capital, has never listed publicly, and Vembu has consistently rebuffed speculation about an initial public offering, preferring to remain privately held.

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

The corporate culture flows from the founder. Bourne said even the founder flies economy class and the company refuses acquisitions in favour of building everything in-house.

“You won’t see us slapping our logo on a Formula 1 car,” he said. The same austerity extends to Zoho Schools of Learning, an in-house programme that recruits rural Indian school-leavers without university degrees, trains them, and guarantees them jobs with a paid stipend during training. Bourne said he wants to see the model replicated in South Africa as a contribution to the country’s structural unemployment.

The most visible gap in Zoho’s South African footprint remains a local data centre. South African customers are currently hosted in either the company’s US or European data centres – both of which Zoho says comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act – but for some banking and sensitive-sector customers that is not always enough.

Data centre

Bourne said a South African data centre is on the road map, with Teraco among the colocation partners under discussion, but the timeline has slipped. “I would like it to be done next year, but it looks more like it’s going to be done in 2028,” he said, citing global server and memory price volatility.

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