Transsion, have you heard of them?
They’re the mother company of some brands you already know.
The back story
Phone brand Tecno has largely been the poster child of Transsion around the world since the beginning when they just had feature phones in their lineup.
It has since been joined by youth-focused smartphone brand Infinix and itel, a brand focused on getting mobile devices on just about any hand in the developing market. itel has been a longtime leader in the feature phone market, for instance, taking over from Tecno, which has shifted its focus to other devices up the ladder, including premium smartphones (like fancy foldables) and laptops. Heck, there’s even a Snokor smartphone brand that they dallied with for a short moment before shutting it down (good call).
Syinix, a television brand, is no stranger to Kenyans, starting out with forgettable TVs running Android to growing up and managing to get a license to run Android TV on its budget smart TV sets (there’s a difference). We don’t have the numbers to make authoritative claims about it but a casual stroll along downtown Nairobi and most Kenyan urban areas as well as homes will tell you a story of that TV brand’s growth.
On the accessories front, since they sell many mobile phones, it is only fair that Transsion has an in-house brand that caters to those, right? That’s where Oraimo comes in. They now offer anything from very respectable noise-cancelling earbuds that have garnered rave reviews to chargers, USB cables, power banks, phone cases and just about anything your mobile device needs.
And things haven’t ended there, the Chinese are matching their efforts in hardware with equal efforts in the software. Boomplay, one of the continent’s largest music streaming platforms (beating even Apple Music and Spotify), is from, well, Transsion, and they even used their smartphones to root for it in the early days, reserving the left home screen for the music player app and even making it front and centre of a specific smartphone. Remember the Tecno Boom Jx smartphone series?
Since they have a huge device footprint spanning feature phones, smartphones, tablets, laptops and all their accessories, in addition to platforms like Boomplay, Transsion and its brands have invested heavily in making them work for them. That has meant the devices carrying with them their software vision. That can be seen in XOS on Infinix smartphones and HiOS on Tecno smartphones – however much we bash it for trying to do everything all at once, annoying us in the process.
Similar efforts are also visible on other devices they offer with smart features. They have their own news app, their own app stores, their own browsers, etc. Heck, for those with a keen eye, they should have noticed that the ads on those devices are served from Eagllwin, Transsion’s own ad platform that, by all measures, rivals Google’s own in any market where the Chinese juggernaut has any semblance of influence.
The not-so-surprising conclusion
Last night, during the unveiling of Tecno’s latest Camon series smartphones, the Camon 20 series, Safaricom said that over half of the (mobile) devices on its network are from Transsion.
Honestly, given the background we have provided above, we are not surprised. This has been a long time in the making. There has been a mix of things that have worked in Transsion’s favour to get them here and we can argue about them all day but the point is that they are here. The question now becomes, just how far can they go from here?
