Transsion Holdings

Transsion is the most successful phone manufacturer most people in Europe and North America have never heard of. It sells almost nothing in those markets by design, and instead built a business across Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America under three brands: TECNO, itel and Infinix.

The company got there by building for conditions the rest of the industry had not designed around. It brought dual-SIM handsets to Africa first, because customers were already carrying two SIMs to work around patchy coverage and tariff differences between networks. It tuned camera exposure and processing for darker skin tones, which nobody selling into those markets had bothered to do. It built for battery life measured against unreliable mains power, and put service centres where phones were actually being sold.

Transsion was founded in July 2006 in Shenzhen by Zhu Zhaojiang, who had travelled through more than ninety countries before starting it and opened the company's first African office in Lagos in 2008. At the close of 2025 it was reported to hold around 44 per cent of the African smartphone market.