In recent years, Africa’s mobile network infrastructure has been rapidly improved, and smartphones have been further popularised.
The number of mobile Internet users in Africa is growing rapidly, The General System for Mobile communications Association, GSMA in July, said that in the next few years, sub-Saharan Africa will be the region with fastest growing number of mobile users in the world. It predicted that by 2025, the total number of mobile users in the region will increase to more than 600 million, which is about half of the total population on the African Continent. By then, the number of users accessing the Internet via smartphones will be doubled. Under the stimulation of the demographic dividend, Africa has ushered in a crucial time for digital transformation and digital economy development.
The substantial increase of users has a profound impact on the development model of mobile Internet technology in Africa. Nowadays, from mobile payment to instant messaging, from music streaming media to short video social networking, from online games to online reading, Africa is experiencing an upsurge in the development of the mobile Internet.
The China-African innovation team is constantly bringing forth new ideas in the localisation of mobile Internet products, operations, and strategies in Africa, with the aim of deepening Interconnection and cooperation to jointly build an informationist, Africa. To key on this and become a part of the history, mobile phone makers, Tecno said it decided to invest in sponsorship of the First China-Africa Mobile Internet Economy Summit which held in Nairobi Kenya, last week. The summit was co-sponsored by China-Africa Fund for Industrial Cooperation, CAFIC, GSMA Mobile 360 Series, and Tecno, global.
It brought together more than 200 representatives from top organizations and enterprises in the fields of technology, mobile communications, Internet, venture capital, and entrepreneurship incubation, including Netease, Tencent, Jumia, Google, Facebook, Safaricom, MTN, Goldman Sachs, United Bank for Africa, among others. At the summit, Tecno said it shared its experiences and substantial achievements in the African mobile Internet ecosystem.
With its in-depth involvement in the African market for many years, General Manager of Tecno, Stephen Ha said: “With the digitalisation and modernisation of Africa, we will keep providing users with smart, smooth, simple smartphone devices and mobile internet services. As a forerunner of mobile Internet in Africa, with our own successful experiences and vast smart phone terminal entrance resources, we are willing to help Chinese start-ups interested in African market to go overseas better and faster, and empower excellent start-up teams of Africa to accelerate the rapid incubation and growth of mobile Internet products.”
For him, the company developed a customized intelligent terminal operating system, HiOS, which he believes is more suitable for smartphone users in Africa. He said: “Based on it, Tecno actively cooperates with App store, Palmstore, Game center AHA Games, mobile browser Phoenix Browser, news aggregation APP Scooper, mobile Internet traffic APP SIMO, and other applications to build a mobile Internet ecological chain for Africans.
At the same time, we have actively introduced external high-quality resources and established in-depth partnerships with several mobile internet applications that are popular with African mobile users, including music streaming and download service platform Boomplay, short video social platform Vskit, online reading APP Ficool, and mobile payment APP Palmpay, among other”.
