Tech
zero name recognition inside China, Transsion expanded across Africa
In 2008, Transsion Holdings sold its first mobile device in Nigeria. Within a decade, the Chinese company, which has virtually zero name recognition inside China, had expanded across Africa. In 2017, it overtook Samsung as the continent’s number one mobile phone supplier.
Who’s behind Transsion?
After spending the early 2000s globe-trotting for the overseas business arm of Chinese mobile phone maker Ningbo Bird, Transsion founder Zhu Zhaojiang broke out on his own. He opened Transsion’s first office in Lagos in 2008, and setting his sights on Sub-Saharan Africa, planned to sell millions of phones catering to the African market.
“In the past, firms that did business in Africa and South Asia did not spend too much on research and development (R&D), but in fact, emerging markets require more R&D efforts,” Zhu told Global Times, China’s state-owned national daily.
More than a decade later, Transsion operates three brands from its headquarters in Shenzhen in China: Infinix, Itel, and Tecno. Collectively, they represent the bestselling mobile phones on the African continent — on both basic so-called feature phones and smartphones. Transsion recorded over 40% of smartphone sales in Africa in the last quarter of 2019, according to research firm IDC. For the past three years, Transsion has led Africa in market share.
Now listed on China’s tech-focused STAR Market, Transsion raised over $400 million during its September 2019 IPO. Its current market cap stands at just over $7 billion. The market cap for mobile giant Xiaomi, the world’s leading budget smartphone producer, is $39 billion.
How did they do it?
Transsion’s ethos is rooted in a business strategy called “glocalization,” the creation of products that will sell universally but can be customized to specific markets or regions. In the case of smartphone manufacturing, Transsion has been lauded for paying attention to which features African consumers want in their devices.
Most mobile-savvy Africans know that in order to avoid network fees and get the best connectivity in low-coverage areas, they need more than one SIM card — but most can’t afford two different phones. Transsion solved that problem by selling dual SIM card phones in 2008, two years before competitors like Nokia began to. Today, some Transsion phones even include a four-SIM feature.
One feature that set Tecno apart was its camera, which had been developed for better exposure on darker skin tones. Transsion invested heavily in R&D for this project, analyzing several million photos of dark-skinned Africans and surveying the exposure and color temperature settings of local users. Ultimately, it synthesized these preferences into the design of its own camera.
In Ethiopia, Tecno became the first major phone brand in the country to offer a keyboard in Amharic, the country’s native script. This unlocked an entirely new customer base. Swahili and Hausa keyboards have also been added to Transsion devices.
And, of course, they’re cheap.
Transsion’s feature phones are currently sold for as little as $20.
In Sub-Saharan African countries such as Kenya, Ghana, and Ethiopia, an entry-level mobile phone on average costs 69% of a person’s monthly income, according to a 2019 report from mobile network trade association GSMA. In the poorest 20% of the population in those same countries, that percentage skyrockets to almost three times what a person makes in a month. The cost of a phone matters.
In order to keep its prices low, Transsion bypassed costly additions like palm-sized touch screens, multiple-lens cameras, and advanced computing power. In place of full-fledged smartphones, Transsion sold feature phones, which still allow users to text, call, and access apps like Facebook and use Opera’s internet browser, even though they don’t have access to third-party app stores and other options normally associated with iOS or Android.
“Transsion focused on this cheap model first and then moved to smartphone manufacturing gradually, spreading their influence in the rural regions,” said Louis Liu, an analyst at the market research firm Canalys. Cornering this low-end market early established Tecno and Itel as household names.
Among the top 10 mobile phones sold in Africa in August 2019, the last date available, Transsion brands held eight spots. Itel’s IT1406 was the cheapest phone on the list at a $35 retail price. Its closest competitor, Huawei, was selling its Y6 Pro for $101.
Today, Transsion also outperforms its early rivals in the low-cost feature phone space, including Nokia. The Finnish company, which has been selling phones in Africa since the mid-1990s, once ruled the market in the 2000s but ranks second in feature phone shares across Africa as of 2019, with 10% of units, according to IDC. Transsion now controls more than two-thirds of the market.
Are they stopping with Africa?
Not quite. In 2019, Transsion started expanding its manufacturing operations in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.
“[Transsion] is a success story,” said Ramazan Yavuz, a senior mobile market research manager at IDC. “For a very region-driven brand that has been successful in Africa, I think their efforts in the Indian subcontinent are a replication effort.”
India in particular will be a test of Transsion’s ability to apply its glocalization strategy to a bigger and more competitive environment. The country buys more premium smartphones than the African markets where Transsion operates, and device makers like Oppo, Huawei, and Xiaomi have spent years earning their Indian market shares. But India is the second largest smartphone market in the world after China, and there may still be room to compete in the “ultra-low-end” bracket.
Apple , opens new tab plans to spend more than $30 billion under a multi-year chip supply deal with Broadcom, bolstering its U.S. sourcing as President Donald Trump’s administration pushes to expand domestic chip manufacturing.
Broadcom shares rose more than 4%, while Apple shares were down marginally.
Apple said on Wednesday the deal, which was struck earlier this week and runs through 2031, covers FBAR filters – or radio-frequency chips used for wireless connectivity in its devices – that it had been developing with Broadcom since at least 2023.
Broadcom will invest $1.5 billion to expand its Fort Collins, Colorado, factory under the deal, which Apple said would result in the production of at least 15 billion chips and support its work with the Trump administration to source more components domestically.
“The cutting-edge components built in Fort Collins are essential to delivering the incredible performance and connectivity our customers expect, and we’re proud to deepen our investments in U.S.-based suppliers that share our commitment to excellence and innovation,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.
“We’re grateful to the president and his administration for supporting important projects like this.”
In August 2025, Apple raised its U.S. investment commitment to $600 billion over four years, adding $100 billion to a previously announced spending plan.
China is planning to allow the country’s top AI companies to buy a limited number of Nvidia’s, opens new tab H200 chips, the Information reported on Wednesday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Chinese officials have told Alibaba, opens new tab, ByteDance and DeepSeek in recent weeks that they may soon receive permission to buy some H200 chips, the report said.
Shares of Nvidia rose 1% after the report.
The chip giant did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment, nor did the U.S. commerce department, which oversees exports of advanced AI chips overseas.
China’s commerce ministry also did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek did not respond outside of regular business hours.
The U.S. government has allowed Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to China, and licensed about 10 Chinese firms to buy the chips. However, Chinese officials, keen to nurture domestic suppliers, have withheld approval so far.
Reuters reported in March that Nvidia had won Beijing’s approval to sell the chips to China, citing sources, and around the same time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also told CNBC that the company had clearance from China.
Beijing is still determining the exact number of Nvidia chips to approve, and it could amount to fewer than 200,000 in total, the Information said, adding that was less than half of what the companies requested earlier this year.
Last month, Reuters exclusively reported that Nvidia told Chinese clients its new “Vera” central processors for AI data centres could be available as soon as August and that they can begin placing orders.
Nvidia’s market share in China has effectively fallen to zero, Huang said in October, hurt by U.S. export controls and Beijing’s push for self-reliance in key technologies.
The potential shift in China’s stance underscores the growing computing capacity crunch that the country’s tech companies are facing.
A team of software testers found that Australian social media platforms did not request age proof for any of 50 accounts that declared themselves to be 16, a result that leaves the country’s world-first under-16 ban “ineffective” at the most basic screening stage, according to a study seen by Reuters.
Since December, platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube have been required to bar people under 16 and take “reasonable steps” to verify age, with regulators recommending multiple layered checks. But the new research, conducted by those who advised the nationwide curb, shows that the initial vetting step, which estimates a user’s age from general online activity, is failing to flag young people for tougher verification.
The testers, who last year trialled age-assurance software on more than 1,000 Australians, opened 50 new accounts after the law took effect and set the age as 16. None of the platforms asked for additional proof, the researchers told Reuters. The findings highlight a flaw that has been largely overlooked while public debate has focused on photo-based age-estimation tools.
The ban’s rollout has been widely criticised after surveys indicated that most under-16s still access the platforms. The government last month doubled the maximum fine and warned of possible court action against tech giants, accusing them of setting the system up to fail. Platforms have countered that they are simply following the regulator’s guidance, which prioritises low-friction checks and prevents reliance on government ID alone due to privacy concerns.
Some advisers to the original trial said they had repeatedly warned that the testing process ignored real-world circumvention, including minors entering false birthdates. “We did want to talk about circumvention, but we kept on being told that that wasn’t part of the actual trial,” Colm Gannon of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children told Reuters. A youth digital rights academic involved in a longer-term study of the ban said more impressive results might emerge once platforms move to age-inference methods later in the year. The regulator maintains that the recommended layered approach, if implemented correctly, ensures no single point of failure.
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