South Africa is now one of Zoho’s fastest-growing markets, and the Indian software giant says the reason is simple: it charges in rand, not dollars, and it has spent years quietly adapting its platform for local businesses. That combination, according to Andrew Bourne, Zoho’s regional head for Southern Africa, has pushed the country into the third-fastest-growing spot in Zoho’s top 15 markets.
Bourne told us the growth is not happening by accident. In a market where many business tools are still billed in foreign currency, South African companies are feeling the squeeze every time the rand weakens. From cloud services to productivity software, the dollar-based pricing model has become a growing burden on IT budgets, especially for small and medium-sized firms trying to keep costs under control.
“Cost is a huge factor,” Bourne said in an interview with TechCentral on Thursday. He argued that many South African companies have come to Zoho after comparing prices with better-known competitors and finding a significant gap. Zoho’s Zoho One bundle, which gives access to more than 50 business applications for a single per-employee fee, has become one of the company’s strongest selling points in the local market.
That matters in a country where businesses are increasingly wary of subscription creep. The modern South African workplace depends on a stack of foreign platforms, from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace and dozens of specialist SaaS tools. When those products are priced in dollars, the cost can rise sharply without any change in usage, simply because the currency has moved.
Zoho’s pitch is different, and it is clearly working. The company may sit below the biggest global names in the analyst rankings, but it has managed to carve out a loyal customer base by keeping pricing predictable and, just as importantly, local. In Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Zoho was recognised as a Visionary for the fourth time, and it has now appeared in Gartner’s assessments for 15 consecutive years.
Yet the rankings also show how the market still views the company. The top Leaders quadrant remains dominated by Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle, while Zoho continues to position itself as the more agile, more affordable alternative. In other categories, the company is still outside the main leadership pack, but Bourne’s view is that South African customers care more about fit and cost than global prestige.
Zoho South Africa growth is being driven by localisation and local pricing
What is less visible to customers, but perhaps more important to Zoho South Africa growth, is the company’s localisation strategy. Zoho has not simply translated its software and hoped for the best. It has built local integrations that address pain points unique to South African businesses, including links to payment gateways used in the country and work underway to connect Zoho Books with SARS eFiling.
That integration could make a real difference for finance teams, as it would allow VAT returns to be submitted directly from the accounting platform. For businesses trying to reduce admin and improve compliance, that kind of feature can be just as persuasive as lower pricing. It is also a sign that Zoho sees South Africa not as a side market, but as a place worth engineering for.
Bourne said Zoho’s local team now numbers about 45 staff split between offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The broader African footprint stretches beyond South Africa, with offices in Mauritius, Nairobi, Lagos and Cairo, as the company continues to expand across adjacent markets on the continent.
There is also something unusual about Zoho’s corporate DNA. The company was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu, a Princeton-trained electrical engineer who began his career at Qualcomm in San Diego, together with his brothers and co-founder Tony Thomas. It started life as AdventNet, a network management software business, before becoming Zoho Corporation in 2009 as the SaaS side of the operation took over.
Zoho has since passed US$1-billion in annual revenue, according to the company, but it has done so without taking venture capital or listing on a stock exchange. Vembu has repeatedly pushed back against pressure to go public, choosing instead to keep the business privately held and tightly controlled. That independence remains a defining part of the brand.
In January 2025, Vembu stepped away from the chief executive role and became chief scientist, where he now focuses on research and development, especially around AI, as well as his rural development projects in India. Shailesh Kumar Davey became group CEO, while Vembu’s brother Mani continues to run the Zoho.com division, which houses the company’s core SaaS suite.
Bourne said that culture still shapes the company’s public image and internal decision-making. Zoho is famously frugal by global tech standards. According to him, the founder still flies economy, and the company prefers building products itself rather than buying rivals. That means no flashy sponsorships, no expensive brand campaigns, and no appetite for the kind of dealmaking seen across Silicon Valley.
“You won’t see us slapping our logo on a Formula 1 car,” Bourne said. He also pointed to Zoho Schools of Learning, an in-house programme that recruits rural Indian school-leavers without university degrees, trains them and guarantees employment while paying a stipend. Bourne said it is the kind of model he would like to see adapted in South Africa, where structural unemployment remains one of the country’s most stubborn economic challenges.
The biggest gap in Zoho’s local operation, however, is still infrastructure. The company does not yet have a South African data centre, and local customers are currently hosted in US or European facilities. Zoho says those environments comply with POPIA, but for some clients, especially in banking and other sensitive sectors, that is not always enough.
A local data centre would strengthen Zoho’s hand in South Africa, particularly if the company wants to win bigger enterprise and regulated-sector contracts. Bourne said the project is on the roadmap, and Teraco is among the colocation partners being considered. But he was candid about the delay, saying the timeline has slipped significantly because of global pressure on server and memory prices.
“I would like it to be done next year, but it looks more like it’s going to be done in 2028,” he said. For now, that may not be a deal-breaker for the company’s core customer base of SMEs, many of whom are simply looking for software that does not come with a dollar-denominated sting.
As we reported earlier, South African businesses are becoming more selective about the software they buy, and Zoho appears to be reading the room better than many of its rivals. In a country where every basis point of currency weakness matters, local pricing, practical localisation and a lean operating model may be enough to keep Zoho’s momentum going for some time yet.