Huawei aims high for Nigeria smartphone sales

Huawei Technologies, the mainland's largest manufacturer of networking equipment, plans to double smartphone sales in Nigeria this year as it seeks to boost its global market share, company officials said.

The firm - which released its Ascend P6 smartphone in Lagos, the commercial capital of Africa's biggest phone market, on September 6 - forecast it would sell 200,000 smartphones in the country by the end of the year, Tony Liang, the managing director of Huawei's consumer business group for West Africa, said earlier this month. That is twice the number it sold last year.

"With Nigeria developing economically, smartphone use will boom over the next five years," Liang said.

More than 90 per cent of the phones used in the country now were "feature phones", used only for voice calls and text messages, leaving room for smartphone growth, he said.

The Shenzhen-based firm seeks to become one of the world's top three smartphone vendors by 2018. Nigeria had 117 million mobile-phone subscribers in June, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission, for a population of more than 160 million.

With many subscribers acquiring more than one line, the number will grow to more than 200 million in 2017, London-based research firm Informa Telecoms & Media estimates.