Editing by Greg Gao

Africa’s No. 1 mobile phone supplier from China Transsion(传音) enjoys a 48.2% share of the African smartphone market, three times that of its closest competitor Samsung (16%), reported African media. 

At a recent investor meeting, a Transsion senior executive attributes his company’s success to its down-to-earth efforts in localization and differentiation of local markets.

With its slogan “global vision, local execution,” the Shenzhen-based company managed to gain deep insight into user needs in its target markets and create products customized to specific markets or regions. 

Transsion’s popular brands in Africa include Tecno, Infinix, and Itel. They are equipped with a deeply customized operating system (Transsion OS) based on the Android system. The OS offers application stores, advertising distribution platforms, and big data service platforms.

The company also cooperates with leading Chinese Internet companies such as NetEase, and actively develops and incubates mobile Internet products for the African market. So far, it has more than 10 self-developed applications with 10 million monthly active users.

The penetration rate of smartphones in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020 is 48%, and it is expected to increase to 64% by 2025, according to forecasts of GSMA, a mobile network industry association. 

Africa’s population will grow from 1.34 billion in 2020 to 1.69 billion in 2030, the fastest-growing region in the world, according to Worldometers.

The two factors will drive long-term and sustained growth in demand for smartphones in Africa, said the Transsion executive.