Earlier this month I pulled the trigger and purchased what was arguably the cheapest unlocked 4G smartphone anywhere.
At €1 and ninety-nine including tax and shipping (around €XNUMX, AU$XNUMX), the Mara XXNUMX was for sale on Amazon UK (but appears to be out of stock at the time of writing). Article).
There are other more affordable smartphones on the market (via Aliexpress), but the X1 is the only new phone to combine three GB of RAM and a recent version of Google's ubiquitous Android mobile operating system.
Africa, the next frontier?
These days, the last thing you want to do is run an older version of Android with more vulnerabilities and holes than Swiss cheese. The X1 is a really well built phone with Android 4, XNUMX cameras, NFC, a fingerprint scanner, a couple of years warranty and proudly displays a huge "Made in Africa" logo on the product box.
For quite some time, the second largest continent has lagged behind in technology. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise to some degree, as a generation of users went straight to mobile technology that initially lacked the kind of legacy mindset common in more technologically advanced countries, especially in the West. Fewer landlines, a partially small fleet of laptops and desktops, and effectively not the same reliance on traditional desktop-based user interfaces.
A blank box that others have already tried to conquer, Nicolás Negroponte's OLPC XO laptop was supposed to bring ubiquitous computing to Africa and other tech-hungry continents. This never materialized and smartphones filled the void.
In 1, a young entrepreneur, Ashish Thakkar, introduced the Maraphone X1 and ZXNUMX. Based in Rwanda, Thakkar is a handsome businessman with plenty of quotes on his Twitter account and a musky demeanor to displeasure. “China has Huawei, Xiaomi; USA has the iPhone and finally Africa has Maraphone. This project is going to show the potential and capacity of Africa to generate affordable and high-quality smartphones in Africa, by Africans, for Africans and for the rest of the world”, Thakkar joked at the launch of the brand.
However, things went wrong; the company hasn't released a smartphone since that time (unless you count the Mara S, with its 1GB RAM and 1GB ROM, as worthy of the smartphone moniker). The XXNUMX I bought was almost certainly the one that was discounted for deletion, and the whole story serves as a warning to ambitious newcomers who lack global impact, a virtually infinite marketing budget, or, in our story, support from China.
Impressively durable material
Mara, the company behind Maraphones, had factories in Rwanda and South Africa and in February XNUMX a news report was published revealing that the South African manufacturing plant had closed permanently. It turned out that building smartphones is the easy part. Even if you sell them... Over the past decade, Chinese manufacturers have steadily tightened their grip on the global smartphone market and, were it not for Huawei's fall in XNUMX, they would almost certainly compete. with Samsung for the top spot. The hegemony we see in the Windows world (Lenovo, Dell and HP) is reflected in the Android cosmos (Oppo, Xiaomi and Samsung).
The current ecosystem dichotomy between Windows and Android is here to stay, with companies showing a really strong affinity for the former and users showing a really strong preference for Google. Where things get interesting quickly is in software and services, where barriers to entry are virtually non-existent, leaving many applicants from less developed countries to try new things.
And Africans have seen a lot of action lately; a glance at my news feed testifies to this, especially regarding Fintech. Google's Sundar Pichai has pledged a US$XNUMX billion investment to boost African connectivity and accelerate digital transformation. The Nigerian duo, Tingo and Flutterwave, are worth nearly €XNUMX billion at their most recent valuations and a number of small start-ups have attracted significant investment, a clear indication that Africa is open for business when it comes to Software as a Service.
China wants a piece of the African pie
A December XNUMX report by Yinka Adegoke of The Rest of the World paints a disturbing picture of China's growing technological impact in Africa. Billions of US dollars have been invested since the early XNUMXs in basic infrastructure as part of its "Digital Silk Road" initiative that gives China unparalleled influence on how Africans use technology: thousands of meters square miles of data centers, miles, and miles of fiber optics. .
ZTE and Huawei remain two of the largest infrastructure vendors on the continent despite their status as pariahs in the West. Transsion, a little-known phone manufacturer in Europe and the US, has fifty percent of the total African smartphone market with 3 brands (itel, Infinix and Tecno) and has a market capitalization of €12 billion. This was surely the most essential reason why Mara failed.
All this to say that when it comes to hardware, China, the world's manufacturing powerhouse, has no competition. If you're addressing a mature market (for example, smartphones) where differentiators other than cost are non-existent, then don't be upset that you're going to spend too much on marketing. If it's an emerging project, just follow the Elon Musk playbook. Africa, it seems, could end up becoming a software powerhouse over the next decade, but the shadow of China will hang over its success, for better or worse.