Camera clarity, dual sims, internet connectivity, good speakerphones for phone calls and music. These are some of more important requirement surrounding the African user’s phone experience.
It is with this in mind, that Transsion’s Tecno took the African telecommunications market by storm, taking over Samsung as the premier phone brands in the African mobile brand.
Transsion has grabbed 40 per cent of the African market, outcompeting much bigger opponents like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.
Tecno and itel, two brands owned by Transsion, took the third and first spot in the African mobile market in the third quarter of 2016, respectively, data from technology consultancy Counterpoint Technology Market Research showed.
In the first half of 2016, Transsion shipped 32.9 million handsets to overseas markets. In comparison, the number for Huawei, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, was 25.4 million units.
Transsion was the first Chinese smartphone vendor to explore the African market. It also built the world’s first smartphone plant in the continent.
Its success highlights how little-known Chinese firms are conquering overseas markets by leveraging China’s sophisticated manufacturing capacity and their experience to fight for survival in the domestic market.
Stephen Ha, general manager of Tecno, said: “We started to zero-in on the African market as early as 2008 after the competition intensified in China.”
That was a time when the continent was almost forgotten by most big international brands. The lack of competitive local players also leaves a gap in the market for Transsion to fill.
In 2011, Transsion set up a smartphone plant in Ethiopia, the first one in the African continent, to help speed up product delivery and lower costs. Now it is working on a new plant in Nigeria.
One of the strengths that aided their success in the African market is their dual sim and camera clarity, with the company quickly gained popularity through its dual-SIM smartphones. Ha said: “We noticed local consumers wanted to have two SIM cards, but most of them could not afford two handsets.
On camera clarity, African customers are no exception from the rest of the world when it comes to selfies. But it is quite difficult for them to have good pictures, because darker skin makes it difficult for many cameras to recognise their faces.
To solve this problem, Tecno smartphones locate consumers’ face by focusing on their teeth and eyes.It has performed data analysis on African users’ face shapes, colors and their preferences of photo effects to determine how much extra light exposure is needed to lighten up their photos.