China’s US$10 budget phone maker seeks fortune in Belt and Road countries
- Transsion plans to invest 3 billion yuan after its IPO on more factories, research and development, and new product lines
While China’s largest smartphone makers are making a big push to compete against Apple and Samsung Electronics in the industry’s premium market segment, a little-known company in Shenzhen is gunning for millions of consumers around the world with mobile phones priced from US$10.
Transsion Holdings has been focused on bringing affordable smartphones and feature phones, handsets with physical keypads and limited functionality, to developing economies since it was founded in 2006. It is a strategy that allowed the company to become the biggest mobile phone supplier in Africa.
That approach is unlikely to change, despite recent efforts by its larger peers in China to spin off secondary brands that would help drive sales in the fast-growing premium smartphone segment.
“Consumers in most of the markets that Transsion is expanding into are price-sensitive, so its business model will not change any time soon,” said Zaker Li, a senior industry analyst at IHS Markit.
Transsion reiterated that business strategy in its prospectus for an initial public offering (IPO) on Shanghai’s new technology board. The company said it was “committed to providing high-quality mobile communications terminal equipment to overseas emerging market users, especially those in the ‘Belt and Road’ countries”.
