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Huawei Looks To Nigeria Smartphone Boom Do Double Its Business

Huawei Looks To Nigeria Smartphone Boom Do Double Its Business

From Bloomberg

Huawei Technologies Co., China’s largest networking-equipment manufacturer, plans to double smartphone sales in Nigeria this year as it seeks to boost its global market share, company officials said.

Huawei, which released its Ascend P6 smartphone, said to be the “world’s slimmest phone” in Lagos, the commercial capital of Africa’s biggest phone market, on Sept. 6, forecasts it will sell 200,000 smartphones in the country by year-end, Tony Liang, managing director of the company’s consumer business group for West Africa, said in a Sept. 10 interview in the city. That’s twice the number it sold last year.

“With Nigeria developing economically, smartphone use will boom over the next five years,” he said. More than 90 percent of the phones used in the country now are “feature phones,” used only for voice calls and text messages, leaving room for smartphone growth, he said.

The Shenzhen-based company seeks to become one of the top three smartphone vendors globally by 2018. Nigeria had 117 million mobile-phone subscribers as of June 2013, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission, for a population of more than 160 million. With many subscribers acquiring more than one line, the numbers will grow to more than 200 million subscriptions in 2017, London-based research company Informa Telecoms & Media estimates.

Read more at Bloomberg.