Shenzhen-based Transsion Holdings is now a massive Chinese technology company that few people outside of Africa and certain parts of Asia have heard of. Even in China, the brand, now the world’s 5th-largest mobile phone producer, remains largely unknown.
Transsion gained notoriety after it entered the African market in 2006. Back then, the world’s largest phone brands all but ignored African consumers, selling low-end, late-model devices designed primarily for Western and Asian consumers.
The Chinese company saw an opportunity and tweaked the software on its phones to optimize photos for darker skin tones, and added a suite of features like dual SIM cards, dustproofing, and longer battery life to sell sub-$100 phones to Africa’s booming youth market. That formula worked, and the company’s three brands, Tecno, Infinix, and iTel, have dominated the market for more than a decade.
But little is known about how Transsion achieved its success in Africa. Lu Miao, an assistant professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, joins Eric & Cobus to lay out the company’s strategy and why it was so effective in a market that others largely ignored.
Purchase the book: The Transsion Approach: Translating Chinese Mobile Technology in Africa by Lu Miao: https://a.co/d/04AKaajZ
📌 Topics covered in this episode:
- Why rural-first strategy beat Silicon Valley-style scaling
- How African distributors helped shape product design and marketing
- The importance of dual SIM cards, long battery life, and localized features
- The role of Carlcare repair centers in building long-term loyalty
- The shift from feature phones to smartphones and rising competition
- Growing patent lawsuits and the next phase of AI-driven competition
Show Notes:
- CKGSB Knowledge: Tailored Technologies: How Transsion came to dominate the African phone market by Patrick Body
- TechPoint Africa: Transsion takes Africa-grown phone empire to Hong Kong in new IPO bid
- Rest of World: Chinese smartphone maker Transsion’s strategy to win hearts and wallets in small-town India by Pratap Vikram Singh
About Lu Miao:
Lu Miao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She works at the intersection of critical media studies, science and technology studies, and Africa-China studies. She is the author of The Transsion Approach: Translating Chinese Mobile Technology in Africa (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Her works have appeared in Information, Communication & Society, Big Data & Society, and Science, Technology & Human Values. She is currently working on a new manuscript, entitled Tropical Data Centers: Media, Heat, and Energy Politics in Afro-Asia.
Transcript:
ERIC OLANDER: Hello and welcome to the show, a proud member of the Seneca podcast network. I’m Eric Holander, and as always, I’m joined by CGSP’s head of research, Cobus van Staden from beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. A very good afternoon to you, Cobus.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Good afternoon.
ERIC OLANDER: Cobus, today we’re going to talk about a fascinating technology story that you and I have been talking about consistently over the past 10, maybe even more years, but it’s still a story that is not very well understood by the outside world. And it’s the success of a company called Transsion Holdings in Africa.
And again, this is a widely reported but poorly understood story. And let me take you back to the early 2010s: internet penetration in Africa was roughly 16%. Now that increases to around 40% by 21, 22, and today it’s around 37, 38%.
That means a majority of the continent still doesn’t have fixed-line internet connectivity, but that doesn’t really tell you much, because Africa, like almost every other developing region, doesn’t access the internet via landline. It gets it from a mobile phone. So let’s go back to that same period in the 2010s, 2012, 2013, or so.
Back then, about 40-50% of the population across the continent owned a mobile phone. Now, back then, those phones were largely what we call feature phones. Those were, uh, in the U.S., we called them like the Snickers candy bar phones, which were basically Nokia’s and Ericsson’s, and they didn’t have internet connectivity today.
That figure, though, is around 66%. And a lot of that growth is due to one company that most of you who are listening to the show or watching this on YouTube have never heard of. Obviously, it’s not Apple.
It’s not Samsung. It’s not even Nokia or Ericsson that used to dominate sales in Africa. Nope.
It’s what I mentioned at the top. It’s the company Transsion Holdings, based in Shenzhen, China, that has totally crushed the competition in Africa for a very long time. Transsion has three brands, Techno, Infinix, and Itel, that have achieved something no other brands anywhere in the world have done.
They’ve totally dominated a massive regional market, outselling the big players from the U S, Europe, and Asia for more than a decade, last year. And it’s been this way for a long time. Transsion’s cumulative market share was somewhere between 47 and 51% of all mobile phone sales on the continent, which includes both feature phones and smartphones.
And it’s also important to note that Transsion doesn’t only dominate the phone space, but also co-owns the most popular music streaming service in Africa, Boomplay, which is way more popular than Spotify and Apple Music. It has hugely successful mobile payment apps and other services that have all benefited from the company’s massive distribution, particularly to young audiences across Africa. Cobus, we have been talking about Transsion for a decade now since they’ve swept the market and it’s still as remarkable a story today as it was back in the early tens, 2010s.
Given the scale of what Transsion’s accomplished in Africa, it’s surprisingly under-reported and under-researched. Now there’s a new book out, and we’re going to talk about it. Let me get your take on it first. What’s your sense of this remarkable story?
COBUS VAN STADEN: I think in lots of ways, Transsion has been as transformative in Africa as the Belt and Road Initiative. As the Belt and Road Initiative added infrastructure and transformed African landscapes, it also introduced new complications in many ways for Africa. And in similar ways, I think Transsion has really changed the scene, changed the logic of what the tech business in Africa could look like.
On the back of it, it opened up a whole set of new business ecosystems. I think the scale of the story has always been tempered by how difficult it is to report it because we’ve seen over the years many attempts to talk about Transsion and coverage of some of the basic issues. They managed to sell a lot of phones at relatively low prices at the bottom of the pyramid in Africa, but how they actually did that remained kind of off limits.
It remained very difficult to report. So this is one of the reasons why this book, I think, is so exciting.
ERIC OLANDER: So the book is The Transsion Approach, Translating Chinese Mobile Technology in Africa by Lu Miao, an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. She joins us today from her office in Hong Kong. A very good afternoon to you, Miao, and congratulations on the book and thank you for joining us.
LU MIAO: Good afternoon. Thank you very much for having me. I’ve been a big fan of this podcast for a while, so it’s very nice to be connected.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, it’s wonderful to finally meet you. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. At the end of our show, when Kobus and I do our commentary, I’m going to rave about it, but I’ll save that for the end of the show.
I want to get a little bit of understanding about Transsion, a little bit of the background. People don’t know that this is a company in Shenzhen. It’s poorly understood by the outside world.
Even in Africa, people aren’t familiar with corporate ownership. Maybe before we get into what made Transsion so successful and what their tactics and methods were in the culture of the company, you can tell us a little bit about the background of how the company got started, particularly in West Africa.
LU MIAO:
I think to understand the rise of Transsion, we need to take a historical perspective. My book focuses on three aspects to explain this. First is its design.
People often attribute Transsion’s success to its affordable price and locally tailored design features like multiple SIM cards, long-lasting battery, and camera optimized for darker skin tones, right? What I want to add here is how this design practice benefited from Shenzhen’s manufacturing ecosystem in the early 2000s. Actually, long before Transsion was founded, Shenzhen designers had engaged with African populations through Shanzhai phones, the so-called copycat phones.
But over the years, Shan zhai has evolved a lot and it takes on new meanings like grassroots innovation, serving markets ignored by big corporations. I think Transsion is a product of the post-Shan zhai era, which is deeply rooted in this vibrant ecosystem, but meanwhile goes beyond it by moving up the value chain through branded phones. The second aspect I think is Transsion’s extensive distribution network, especially in rural areas.
And in many African countries, Transsion uses a four-level distribution channel that consists of national agents, sub-dealers, wholesalers, and retailers. And this is a vast network that covers not just the cities, but also small towns and villages. And this is not a new strategy, but it was used by Chinese phone makers three decades ago.
So here I want to mention that Transsion was founded by former employees of Ningbo Bird or Bodao in Chinese. So when Bird started as a township enterprise in the 1990s, it couldn’t compete with big Western brands in the urban area. And so, to avoid competition, Bird began in less competitive rural markets, a survival strategy that has sometimes been described as surrounding cities with the countryside.
And so most of Transsion’s founding members come from Bird, including the founder George Zhu. So it’s no surprise that they are using a similar strategy in Africa. The big difference here is that in Africa, Transsion worked with local distributors.
And I think those local distributors played a crucial role in helping Transsion build this distribution network and finally gain a foothold in Africa. The third aspect, I think, is Transsion’s after-sales network called Carl Care. So if we look at Ghana, previously, there were only two repair options.
One is the high-end approach used by big tech companies like Samsung. It’s reliable but very expensive. And the other is the low-end approach used by street repair shops.
It’s affordable but not very reliable. So the emergence of Carl Care provides a middle ground between those two extremes. And for many people, this is an attractive new repair option that balances quality and affordability, which helps Transsion build its brand image.
So these are a few things that I want to highlight about Transsion. And in my book, I used an agricultural metaphor called de-plowing to theorize its business model, which I can elaborate on later.
COBUS VAN STADEN: You know, I wonder, as you mentioned it, this concept of de-plowing was very interesting to me. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. And I was wondering, particularly also, is this the metaphor that you were using as an analytical frame within your own work?
Or did you also find that metaphor echoed to you by Transsion executives themselves?
LU MIAO: Actually, this term was firstly used by Transsion itself during media interviews. And Transsion managers often use this term to publicize its business strategy. And here, I’m appropriating this idea while making it more critical and theoretical.
So in agriculture, de-plowing represents a labor-intensive approach of cultivating the land to grow crops. It often demands long-term inputs before any growth can be achieved. And this sharply contrasts with Silicon Valley’s doctrine of blitzscaling, a capital-intensive approach of conducting a high-speed land grab in the hope of finding gold.
I think in the case of Transsion, because it’s a latecomer in the mobile phone industry, and to some extent, it was forced to begin with this rural market, ignored by big corporations. And it was forced to adapt to the demise of these rural markets. So I think the strategy of using de-plowing is shaped by this structural inequality of the global ICT industry.
I think as a business model, it’s not unique to Transsion. I think it’s a common feature, wisely seen in Chinese tech companies in their early days. If you look at Huawei, for example, when it was not that strong, it also began with rural markets before it was strong enough to compete in big cities.
I think it is a business model that is suitable for Chinese tech companies in the early stage of their development.
ERIC OLANDER: And that’s brought over from, as you mentioned, that Huawei dealt with that. But because the Chinese market itself is so brutally competitive, sometimes starting in the big cities is just not possible. So they go out to some of the provinces, build the markets there, as you say, de-plow.
And you said that this was an agricultural technique widely used, not only in China, but other parts of East Asia, but again, not common in the West. And they brought that as a business culture into Africa. You also then go on in the book to say that Transsion developed a labor-intensive, rural-centric, again, there’s what you talked about, low-value-added, lower-class-oriented approach in their business practice.
Can you expand on that, specifically that lower-class part of it?
LU MIAO: By this, I mean in Transsion’s global expansion, it focuses more on rural markets than the urban markets. Like in 2018, I did a three-month internship at Transsion’s Shenzhen headquarters. And then I went, I conducted a few work in Ghana.
And according to my observation, you know, Transsion has three brands: ITEL, Techno, and Infinix. And for ITEL, it does 90% offline marketing and only 10% online, because most of those online marketing methods are too expensive for ITEL. And most of ITEL’s target users live in rural areas, right?
If you do television ads, you will not reach them. And for Techno, it’s half, half. It does 50% of online marketing, 50% of offline marketing.
I think it strikes me a bit that, you know, offline marketing is still so important in Africa. And at Transsion, they often use this term, BTL, below the line to describe their marketing strategy. We can simply understand it as offline marketing.
And it takes many forms like roadshows, competitions, sponsored events, and wall painting advertising. And like 30 years ago, when Bird started as a township enterprise, it also did a lot of wall painting advertising in China’s small towns and villages. I think they are using, to some extent, they are using this similar strategy by prioritizing rural markets.
And I think there’s no, actually, there are not many fancy techniques here. They literally go to the market. And the team I was based during my internship was called Go-To-Market, GMT.
This is what I mean by lower-class-oriented and rural-centric.
COBUS VAN STADEN: One of the ideas or one of the things that’s said about Transsion a lot is that they managed to have this successful business model by particularly tailoring their models, their technology to the needs of African users. What I was actually wondering about is how they managed to get that data? Like, how did they actually understand the needs of these African users?
And, you know, why were they able to tap into those actual demands while other competitor companies couldn’t?
LU MIAO: Actually, one of my major arguments in my book is the importance of translators, right? I was arguing that Transsion is translating those, translating, if we talk about distribution and marketing, Transsion is translating a Chinese rural distribution and marketing strategy to Africa. And this is not a straightforward process, but full of negotiations and conflicts.
And in this process, I think local distributors played a very important role in this translation process. In my book, I spent the whole chapter documenting the stories of local distributors. I think many of them started as informal traders buying from Hong Kong’s Chongqing mansions, mostly secondhand or Shan zhai phones.
And when Transsion approached them 20 years ago, they were still nobodies, and they didn’t know ITEL or TECNO either. But by working together, both of them grew very quickly. And actually, when Transsion first entered Ghana, people didn’t trust Chinese brands a lot because of the flooding of Shan zhai phones.
Chinese products are often associated with low quality. So local distributors have to persuade those customers, you know, Transsion brands’ products are different from previous China phones. And meanwhile, they contributed a lot of local knowledge and local network in building this distribution network.
And if you look at the marketing team, Transsion heavily hired local people to build its local sales force. I remember that in Kumasi, the second largest city of Ghana, there’s only one Chinese manager and about 70 local employees, most of them female. And they worked closely in designing this marketing playbook.
And I think this is an important channel to collect local information and integrate local knowledge into their design, marketing, repair.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah, that reference to Chungking Mansions brings back a lot of memories for me. Chungking Mansions, for those of you who are not familiar, is a legendary place in Hong Kong that has traders from all over the world packed in this densely, just it’s so dense, this building. It’s a giant fire hazard, but it’s one of the most amazing places in the world where you’ll have a Lebanese trader next to an Iranian trader next to a Nigerian trader next to a Chinese trader.
I mean, they’re just all packed in there. Still there, by the way. I think you can still go to Chungking Mansions.
Doesn’t have quite the same aura that it did 20 years ago, I think, when you were talking about it. You know, Transsion, the way you’re describing it really challenges many of our assumptions right now about the Chinese and African, how Chinese companies operate. A lot of people look at Chinese companies as very opaque and distant, and the management is heavily or almost entirely Chinese.
And there’s not a lot of localization. These are the perceptions that a lot of people have. Transsion kind of flips that on its head, because as you’re telling us, in fact, there were very few Chinese.
They hired mostly locals. The other thing that they did was they empowered local marketing executives to start using Ghanaian celebrities. And even within Ghana, they got celebrities for one part of Ghana and then micro-celebrities for another part of Ghana.
Same in Nigeria and other markets as well. Talk to us a little bit about some of the stereotypes that Transsion challenges in terms of how the Chinese do business in Africa and how Transsion really changed the bar for a lot of people and really, you know, changed the game.
LU MIAO: First, I want to add one point regarding hiring locals. I think it varies from department to department. I think if you compare the marketing department with the design department, most of the hardware engineers and software engineers are still Chinese.
They are trying to recruit local talent. But based on my observation during my fieldwork, most of those engineers and the design team are still Chinese. But when it comes to the marketing team and the after-sales service network, I think they hire a lot of local people.
ERIC OLANDER:
And that’s unusual for Chinese companies, though, right? I mean, obviously, construction companies will hire local workers. But for empowering locals to make marketing decisions, as much as Transsion has, according to your book, it felt a little bit unusual to me.
And it was very much a pioneering way of doing business.
LU MIAO: It varies from company to company. Like, if you look at Huawei, because it mainly focuses on the urban markets, it does less offline marketing and rural marketing. So it does not need to hire a lot of local people, right?
But if you look at other brands like XTG or other small brands that want to learn from the Transsion model, they are also hiring locals to do the rural marketing.
COBUS VAN STADEN: One of the really interesting aspects of the book for me was that we have these kind of old ideas of kind of Africa being a kind of a, you know, you see that a lot in automotive discussion, for example, Africa being a kind of a market for old technology, for technology that’s kind of a cast off, you know, kind of it is getting its kind of last life, you know, in the African market after being kind of discontinued. But you actually point out that, you know, that this isn’t true on the Transsion side.
And that, for example, the use of what I was very interested in your mention of their use of AI and, you know, optimizing their cameras and other similar kind of ways in which, like, you know, there’s a proactive use of technology to locate it in this market, even though, you know, kind of it isn’t a traditional global North market. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, and about this larger, troubling North-South division that the book touches on.
LU MIAO: I think one of our Transsion’s biggest advantages is to integrate this low tech with high tech. If you look at its design, it’s a mobile phone with dual SIM cards, a large battery, and advanced AI features like an AI camera, a music streaming platform, digital payments, and an AI translation app. And I think for Transsion, it used this deploying model at the early stage of this development.
It laid the foundation for its success in the first decades, but also cast a big shadow on its future business prospects as the competition intensified. So AI for Transsion is the next growth opportunity, and I think it’s important to have a strong sense of crisis as competition intensifies nowadays. You know, in 2019, there were more 3G and 4G connections than 2G connections in Africa, right?
And as people upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone, it raises a question whether the old model can survive or not in the future. I think these are the big questions for Transsion right now, and it also has a strong sense of this crisis. Since last year, Transsion has been sued by several big tech companies, including Nokia and Huawei, for IP infringement. And it raises a question whether and how it can settle those patent lawsuits.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah, in fact, Ericsson just last week came out with a new suit against Transsion in Africa for patent infringement as well. So this continues to be a problem. A couple of years ago, Transsion was found to have spyware on some of its phones, and that was a crisis that it went through, sending commercial and customer data back to China without the user’s consent.
So they’ve had some bumps along the way, to be sure. One of the things that really caught my attention in the book was that you said that the book is trying to move beyond what you call the binary framework of viewing China either as this neocolonial force, and we hear this a lot today in the West, but at the same time from the Chinese side, it’s all about win-win cooperation and development. And you say in many ways that this book and Transsion represents a third path.
Can you expand on that a little bit?
LU MIAO: Okay. I think a lot of the China-Africa relationship focuses on those large-scale infrastructure projects, which generate this binary framework of neocolonial versus win-win development. I think China’s capital making is relational and embedded.
It varies from industry to industry. That’s why we need an empirical study to unpack its local trajectories. In the case of Transsion, I think it cannot be captured by this binary.
To me, Transsion and its local translators represent strategic business cooperation between latecomers in the global ICT industry with the aim of reducing its structural inequality. And meanwhile, in the face of a lot of tensions, I think Transsion creates this middle space that bridges globalization from above and from below, which opens the door to new possibilities and inequalities. You know, if we look at those markets Transsion focuses on previously, they can only engage with second-hand phones, second-hand technology or parallel technologies.
Some scholars describe it as low-end globalization. I think the emergence of Transsion creates this middle space where low-needed users can engage with the digital world. This is what’s significant about Transsion.
On the one hand, it challenges the cultural imagination of big tech. You know, AI can be designed otherwise. Mobile phone can be designed otherwise.
And you can do rural marketing and you can survive. But on the other hand, I think Transsion is also growing into a regional power that is marginalizing small players and increasing local dependence. Like when I revisited Ghana in 2023, Xiaomi and Vivo have already entered Ghana.
And Transsion is fighting against them. And Transsion is persuading those local distributors not to distribute Vivo phones or Xiaomi phones. I think they are also fighting against Shan zhai phones.
One of the ITEL local distributors had a very difficult relationship with Transsion. So they used to be the largest ITEL distributor in Ghana. But because they keep selling Shan zhai phones and to punish them, Transsion refused to give them credits when making orders.
I think this is an example of how Transsion is creating those new space while in the meantime marginalizing small players. So it’s a mixed picture to me.
ERIC OLANDER: And just a reminder, those Shan zhai phones are the kind of low-end, cheap, counterfeit phones that they’re competing against the low end of the market. Kobus, when you hear this, and we talk about the North-South divide on technology again, one of the things that Miao has done with the book is kind of complicate that. You often think about the North-South divide on technology.
What’s your reflection on this?
COBUS VAN STADEN: It’s been very helpful, I think, to read the book for me. You know, it provided a lot of kind of concrete kind of glimpses of these dynamics in action. And, you know, I think it really kind of very concretely raises kind of questions around because the field itself has obviously been focusing on issues around agency, like recipient country agency or African agency a lot.
And I think this is a very interesting example of what that actually looks like, you know, on the ground. Because in a lot of ways, Transsion is bringing in technologies from outside. They are, you know, kind of they are still, you know, even though it’s, you know, kind of they themselves come from the bottom end of the market, unlike someone like Apple.
There still are, you know, this kind of outside intervention, you know, kind of in African market. But I think, Miao, what you’ve shown, I think, in the book is the complexity and the dynamism of a kind of Ghanaian and African kind of inputs into that process. And, you know, and the kind of complex back and forth between, you know, kind of between what they get and what they, you know, like, as you say, new inequalities and new opportunities at the same time.
So I was wondering if you could reflect a little bit on those, like, you know, which kinds of new inequalities are you thinking of? And how do you see this question, this larger kind of field-wide question of African agency, playing into your particular work?
LU MIAO: One big change I observed in my last trip is the intensified capitalization of smartphone distribution. It’s becoming more and more capital-intensive. And when I visited Ghana in 2023, two major local Tecno distributors lost their dealerships due to a series of financial and management problems.
And one distributor who has risen from this reshuffle is a Chinese man called Yang. He first came to Ghana in 1999 as a translator. And then he worked as a secretary for one of the richest Chinese man in Ghana.
And before he founded his own company. And during the pandemic, Yang gained a dealership from four smartphone brands, Infinix, Tecno, Samsung, and Huawei, I think, which is very significant. And actually, local distributors I know also want to obtain this dealership from Samsung.
And a few years ago, two of them united with each other to found a joint company. And they approached, they went to approach Samsung, but was rejected. And it was not just because of their small capital scale, but also because of their management structure.
In the eyes of Samsung, their management structure is not very modern yet. To some extent, it still resembles the mom-and-pop shops. So I think it’s raised a question about how to move up the value chain for local distributors.
And another techno local distributor I know is Mr. Di. He always wants to move up the value chain by launching his own mobile phone brand. And before the pandemic, he often traveled to Shenzhen, visiting those factories who can manufacture his mobile phones.
And in 2019, he did launch a few feature phone models in Ghana. But a few years later, I learned that his mobile phone business has significantly declined. And he was investigated once by Ghana’s economic crime office.
And to diversify his investments, he started a chicken farm during the pandemic. So those stories make me think, as African users upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone, as the mobile phone business becomes more and more capital-intensive, it will be more difficult for local distributors to play this game, you know, to upgrade and to move out of the value chain. This is one big inequality I observe.
And another is AI. Chengxin is trying to enhance his AI patent portfolio in preparation for the future smartphone wars in Africa. To some extent, it’s already happening right now, right?
There’s been a recent debate about who will own that data and whether data collected in Africa will be used beyond the declared purpose of developing mobile phone technology or meeting the demands of African users. So it’s also a recent question to what extent African people can own or truly benefit from this AI technology in the future.
ERIC OLANDER: You mentioned that when you went back to Ghana, you noticed that Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and other Chinese brands had made inroads. Samsung has also evolved its strategy for Africa and is now taking a page out of the Chengxin playbook, customizing products for the African market. So where Chengxin was, say, five, seven years ago, maybe 10 years ago, is not where it is today.
It’s a much more competitive market than it was. And after the pandemic, many investors in Chengxin grew very nervous about the company’s reliance on Africa and said, “You have to diversify into other markets.” So here in Southeast Asia, we’ve got Tecno phones.
They’re in South Asia. They’re also in the Middle East as well. Looking ahead, what lessons do you think this company has drawn from its experience in Africa that it can now bring to other countries in the developing world?
LU MIAO: I think it’s still this localization. You have to work closely with local people to gain insights into local markets. But one thing I’m not sure about is whether it is possible to translate or apply this previous business model to new markets.
But whether it works or not is not guaranteed. Even if Chengxin wants to use this deployment model to explore more markets in Latin America and the Middle East, it’s still contingent on many factors, such as appropriate technology, local adaptations, and development. And sometimes the business logic may also change when you shift from hardware to software.
Chengxin is trying to diversify beyond hardware, beyond mobile phone. It launched a few mobile apps, like music streaming apps, and also a short video platform like Vizkid. As I heard that, the efforts to capitalize the short video business largely failed.
I think Chengxin halted the investment in Vizkit.
ERIC OLANDER: TikTok was just too big. I mean, TikTok was such a force that they couldn’t compete. But they did well in mobile payments with Palm Pay and Boomplay in music.
So they’ve been quite successful in some of the app space.
LU MIAO: Yeah, I think it really depends on this local adaptation.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, the book is The Chengxin Approach, Translating Chinese Mobile Technology in Africa. Again, I cannot emphasize how important a book this is on a topic, again, that is poorly understood. But Lu Miao does a great job in explaining it.
And best of all, unlike a lot of academic books, this one is actually affordable. And I want to encourage everybody to go to Amazon. $19.95, you can get the Kindle edition. It’s not one of those $80 books that everybody can get that’s so expensive only university libraries can afford. So it’s accessible. And I cannot recommend it enough.
Miao, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Lu Miao is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and the author of a seminal book on China-Africa relations. Thank you so much, Miao, for joining us.
LU MIAO: Thank you very much for having me.
ERIC OLANDER: I’ve been doing the China-Africa beat for many years now. And the reason why I’m so enthusiastic about what Miao has done here is that we haven’t seen books like this that really come from a different perspective, other than the geopolitics and the great work that scholars like Deborah Brautigam have done over the years. This is fresh because it takes a topic that is very important to daily life in the China-Africa relationship, particularly for Africans who consume this technology.
And as I said, so much of the growth in the mobile internet market is due to Transsion alone. And so it is such a fundamental part of the China-Africa relationship that doesn’t get the attention that it deserves. The most important thing about Transsion for me is that it proved that you can make a lot of money in Africa.
Africa has always been considered by many Western and Asian brands as a place where you send your bee stock, send used cars, sell used clothing, but it’s not a market where you make money. Let me just remind you that when Transsion went public on the Shanghai Star Exchange, its valuation at the time was $7 billion. And that was largely off a valuation from its sales in Africa.
And that to me is when you see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Council on Africa, which is this American group that tries to get investors, and they struggle so hard to persuade American companies to go into Africa. And the number one thing that you hear from American companies over and over again, and I hear this from European firms as well, is where’s the profit? And it just goes to show that if you understand at least part of the formula about how to engage African consumers, there is money and sometimes a lot of money that’s there, as we’ve seen from Transsion.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Yeah, I think it’s revealing that the kind of dominant focus on what can be done in Africa coming from Western companies is all minerals, right? Kind of it’s all focusing on minerals because it’s giving this, you know, it feels important because it’s competition with China. But it also, you know, kind of feels familiar because that’s what Africa is good for, is extraction, right?
So that’s the only frame through which the content can be understood, you know, I think in many ways among many Western actors. So I think, you know, a lot of the work, not only from Transsion, but also like work that our colleague Njenga Akina, like highlights a lot in his coverage for us on electric mobilities in Africa, is that there’s a lot of people making a lot of money in Africa, but the key way of doing that is actually engaging with the needs and the wants and the experiences of actual African people. And that, of course, I think that is the real red line, I think, for Western engagement, because I think a lot of the framing of Africa is just fundamentally racist and fundamentally kind of anti-human in lots of ways.
So hence, more minerals, you know. So I think that is a very interesting kind of like corrective, I think, that comes from, you know, from the engagement between Africa and non-Western actors.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah. And to be sure, we also want to note that Transsion is by no means alone in doing this. There are other companies like Star Times, for example, that have taken an equally granular, localized grassroots approach.
And I remember, from the brief time I lived in Kinshasa, people telling me about StarTimes. And at that time, DTS, which is a South African satellite service, controlled so much of the market, and Canal Prus as well. And when you called these companies up, they were hugely expensive.
And if you wanted service to come over, it would come in the next three or four days. One of the things that made Star Times different was like Transsion’s Carl Care, which Miao talked about. And by the way, we’ve got Carl Care here in Southeast Asia as well.
I don’t know how they came up with the name Carl Care. C-A-R-L-C-A-R-E. Seems completely random to me that they named it after Carl, but OK.
But for this Star Times question, they would send an installer within two or three hours. The guy scrambles up to the top of your roof, puts it up, and you’re in business. And the packages came in at a fraction of the price of what DTS and what Canal Plus were doing.
And it reminds me of the incredible adaptability of some Chinese businesses that I haven’t seen from others at that level. And it’s just very, very interesting. So a lot of people, again, will use a very broad brush to characterize Chinese businesses in Africa, mostly framed by the extractives or the state-owned enterprises.
The private sector is often much more nimble, as we’re seeing with these tech companies.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Yeah, and again, once he’s in the broader tech sector, like in e-mobilities, for example, you see that a lot. And it’s not only engagement with African consumers, but as Mel was also pointing out, it’s engaging with the entire tech sector of repairing, upcycling, and recycling, and all of these different independent and informal industries that are very strong in Africa, actually. But it’s a bit of herding cats, kind of like you have to, in order to really engage with them, you actually have to engage with them.
You have to be on the ground with them. And I think that kind of is, I think, was a leader, I think, in that respect.
ERIC OLANDER: It’s hard to explain to people who live in advanced industrial economies the importance of these repair facilities. Many of my neighbors, and my wife’s colleagues, and a lot of our friends here in Vietnam, for example, and I see this across Southeast Asia. They still have iPhone 7s and 8s.
This is not disposable societies the way it is in the US and other places where they’re encouraging you to upgrade every year to the latest, newest model, and you basically throw out the old one, you get a new one. Many people often have two or three phones that they’re using for their business, and their home, and other things like that. And so the need to repair either broken screens or update software is enormously important.
And I think this is something that speaks to the success, that they understood this, that people aren’t in a position to simply throw away a phone because either it’s not the latest, or it has a crack in it, or something like that. So I think, in part, this marketing thing she talked about is very important, certainly, but also the innovation on customer service for repairs cannot be overstated across the global South, not just in Africa, but in a lot of developing countries where people’s disposable income doesn’t afford them the ability to simply say, I want the iPhone 17, or iPhone 16, or the new Samsung, or whatnot. Repair is something that you have to do out of necessity.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Yeah, and therefore, it also means an engagement with actual everyday life, not just the customer in the sales, at the point of sale, but actually how the ongoing process of engaging with the longer life of the product as it goes on, and is being used over a long time. And that has been a big weak spot, I think, for a lot of companies.
ERIC OLANDER: Okay, I will put a link to the book in the show notes. Again, it’s available on Kindle for just $19.95. And I say that because we don’t get books like this that come along very often. So I do hope that people will go out and buy it, and will also support the work of academics like Lu Miao, who put a lot of effort into this book.
And again, it is, to me, on par with some of the best China-Africa research that’s out there. So that’ll do it for this edition of the China in Africa podcast, and the China Global South podcast. We’re doing a dual show this week.
If you want to follow the great work that Kobus, Zhihuo, and the entire team around the world are doing, go to ChinaGlobalSouth.com. And of course, if you want to support the work that the team’s doing to support independent journalism, which is becoming increasingly scarce as everybody has been watching the events in Washington at the Washington Post unfold, it means that the work that the team is doing becomes even more important, given the fact that high-quality independent journalism is becoming increasingly rare. And so we rely on you and your support to keep us going.
So thank you for everybody who subscribed. And if you are a student or a teacher, don’t forget, you get half off. Email me, Eric, at ChinaGlobalSouth.com.
And I will send you the links for the half-off discount that starts at $10 a month. Remember to use your academic email when you send that to me. So for Kobus von Staden in Cape Town, I’m Eric Olander.
We’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China in Africa and the China Global South podcast. Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
