Nowadays, many mobile phone manufacturers pay more and more attention to overseas data when releasing sales data. The main reason is that after more than ten years of development of the domestic smartphone industry, the market has been close to saturation, consumers' cognition of mobile phone brands is basically fixed, and it is difficult for manufacturers to obtain high growth in the domestic market, which has set its sights on overseas that were difficult to reach in the past. However, overseas, these mobile phone manufacturers are facing a strong opponent.
This opponent is transsion mobile phones, because it is not sold in China, many people do not know this brand, but overseas, especially in the African market, it is a household name. According to its recent financial report. Transsion Holdings is expected to have revenue of 49.2 billion yuan and operating profit of 4.7 billion yuan in 2021. According to data from Omdia, transsion's Tecno smartphone sales are 30.6 million units, second only to Huawei's 35 million units, ranking tenth in the world.
The founder was a Waveguide executive and was worth 16 billion
When it comes to transsion mobile phones, many people do not know, but if it comes to another brand, presumably many netizens have the impression that it will be a fighter "waveguide" in the mobile phone. Why is transistor related to the waveguide? This brings us to the founder of Transsion Mobile, Zhu Zhaojiang, who is now worth 16 billion yuan and ranks 448th on the Hurun Rich List. Before founding Transsion, Zhu Zhaojiang's last job was at Waveguide Mobile Phone Company.
When Zhu Zhaojiang graduated from university in 1996, Ma Huatenggang also made a set of "network paging platform system" to realize the connection of the pager to the Internet. Zhu Zhaojiang also entered the waveguide during that period, became a pager salesman, and became the chief representative of North China. By the time the pager was eliminated and Bird began to make mobile phones, Zhu Zhaojiang had become the executive vice president of Bird, and his main responsibility was to open up overseas markets.
It was also during the period of exploring overseas markets that Zhu Zhaojiang discovered the huge blue ocean of mobile phones in Africa. In this place where calls are shouted, people urgently need a good and inexpensive communication tool. In 2006, when the domestic "cottage mobile phone" was selling at its best, Zhu Zhaojiang resigned from Bird and founded transsion mobile phones aimed at the African mobile phone market.
Localized operation, with annual sales of 137 million units, accounting for 60% of the market
How do I promote my products in a new region? In fact, the most important thing is to do a good job of localization. When domestic instant messaging first began to catch fire, many companies, including NetEase and Sina, had related products, and even Microsoft launched MSN, but in the end only Tencent's QQ survived. The main reason is that QQ has done localization according to the Internet conditions of domestic netizens, for example, the initial QQ chat records are stored in the QQ server, and only changed to local storage after the popularization of personal PCs.
The same is true for TRANSSION's expansion into the African market. Because there are more operators in Africa, the signal strength of each place is uneven, African consumers have multiple calling cards, TRANSSION brought a dual-SIM dual-standby mobile phone model when entering Africa, and also launched an exaggerated four-card mobile phone in the follow-up, which simply and rudely solved the problem of changing cards and bringing multiple mobile phones. At the same time, the camera function is optimized to solve the problem of photography imaging of African consumers.
In addition, functions such as ultra-long standby and loudspeakers that were originally domestic cottage machines have also been brought to Africa. In 2018, TRANSSION mobile phones already accounted for nearly 60% of the African market. In 2019, including feature machines, the overall sales volume exceeded 137 million units, which can be said to have firmly captured the African market.
The annual growth rate is 47%, becoming a strong enemy of domestic mobile phones overseas
Transsion's development path overseas is similar to Xiaomi's development process in China, in addition to making mobile phones, it also develops a lot of peripheral products with mobile phones as the center, and in the two fields of digital accessories and household appliances, there are two independent brands Oraimo and Syinix. While domestic smartphones are eyeing overseas markets, TRANSSION has also set up a new sub-brand, Infinix and Ityl, the former focusing on mid-to-high-end smartphones, and the latter consolidating the mobile phone market of $10 to $100.
Because of the vast African market and transsion's first-mover advantage, when transsion was listed in September 2019, the market value was 46.2 billion yuan, and since then it has soared all the way, once as high as 199.2 billion yuan. Although it has fallen back so far, there are still 108 billion yuan. According to transsion's recently released 2021 financial report. Its revenue increased by 30.33% compared with the same period in 2020, while its operating profit increased by 47.56% to 4.7 billion yuan.
From these two data, TRANSSION has gradually improved its profitability, and the voice in the express newspaper also pointed out that the company still maintains a competitive advantage in the African market and is also expanding in markets outside Africa. Therefore, when domestic mobile phone manufacturers are ready to enter the overseas market, in addition to Apple Samsung, perhaps Transsion is also a strong opponent they have to face.