The Chinese Phone Giant that Beat Apple to Africa
One of China’s biggest smartphone makers has never sold a handset in the country.
Yet thousands of miles away, it dominates markets across Africa. Unknown in the West, Transsion has left global players like
Samsung and Apple trailing in its wake in a continent that’s home to more than a billion people.
In cities like Lagos, Nairobi and Addis Ababa, busy streets are awash with the bright blue shopfronts of Transsion’s flagship brand, Tecno.
In China, the company doesn’t have a single store, and its towering headquarters in the southern megacity of Shenzhen goes largely unnoticed among skyscrapers bearing the names of more famous Chinese tech firms. The company took a different path to success from other top Chinese smartphone makers such as Huawei and Xiaomi, which started out in China before eventually expanding overseas.
Transsion built its business in Africa. And it has no plans to come home.
The perfeCt selfie
In Edna Mall on the bustling Bole Road in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, Mesert Baru poses for her Tecno Camon i.
“This phone is seriously nice for selfies,” says the 35-year-old shop assistant, admiring the picture she just took.
Mesert’s satisfaction is no accident. Tecno cameras have been optimised for African complexions, explains Arif Chowdhury, vice president of Transsion. “Our cameras adjust more light for darker skin, so the photograph is more beautiful,” he says. “
That’s one of the reasons we’ve become successful.”
Transsion founder George Zhu had spent nearly a decade traveling Africa as head of sales for another mobile phone company when he realized that selling Africans handsets made for developed markets was the wrong approach.
By the mid-2000s, the Chinese government, under its “Going Out” strategy, was encouraging entrepreneurs to look abroad and forge stronger ties with African nations in particular. Cell phones were spreading rapidly in China, but in Africa — which has a roughly similar population — they were still a very rare luxury.
Africa, in other words, could be the new China.
Giving consumers what they want
In 2006, Zhu launched Tecno in Nigeria, targeting Africa’s most populous nation first. From the start, the company’s motto was “think global, act local,” which meant making phones that met Africans’ specific needs. “When we started doing business in Africa, we noticed people had multiple SIM cards in their wallet,” Chowdhury says.
They would awkwardly swap the cards throughout the day to avoid the steep charges operators would levy for calling different networks, says Nabila Popal, who tracks the use of devices in Africa for research firm IDC. “They can’t afford two phones,” says Chowd- hury, “so we brought a solution to them.” Zhu made all Tecno handsets dual SIM. More innovations followed. Transsion opened research and development centers in China, Nigeria and Kenya to work out how to better appeal to African users.
Local languages such as Amharic, Hausa and Swahili were added to keyboards and phones were given a longer battery life. Extra juice was important. In Nigeria, South Africa and Ethiopia, for example, the government frequently shuts off electricity to conserve power, leaving people unable to charge their phones for hours.
In less developed markets, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chowdhury says, consumers might have to walk 30 kilometers to charge their phone at the local market -and have to pay to do so. “For those kind of consumers, longer battery life is a blessing,” he adds.
Sewedo Nupowaku, the Lagos-based Chief Executive Officer of entertainment company
Revolution Media, says he switched from a Samsung S3 to a Tecno L8 for this reason. “I can spend 24 hours constantly talking, browsing on this phone, no problem. With a Samsung, no way.”
Expanding in India and beyond
For Transsion, future growth is set to come from building its business outside Africa in other developing markets, such as Russia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
In 2017, it launched Tecno in India and within a year had claimed five per cent of the huge market, according to IDC.
How did Tecno make such rapid progress? Transsion’s Chowdhury says another innovation tailored to local customs has helped.
“Indian people use their hands to eat food,” he says, “so their fingers get oily. What if you’re having lunch and your boss calls? You try to take the call but your fingerprint won’t work.” The fix: screens that can read greasy fingers.