Microsoft, taking aim at the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market, said on Monday that it would team up with Huawei of China to sell a low-cost Windows smartphone in Africa.
Missed yesterday on 20-hour workday that featured 4 flights - sweet! Just to go to fricking Norfolk from Indy. Such is the cost of being able to sleep in your own bed both nights (I have had all the hotels in this world that I care to). Unbelievable logistics that left my head aching from all the up-and-down. I am going to build a future that has minimal flying and maximum time on the waves. Count on it.
MS and Huawei do a GM-SAIC (my fave example of getting yourself some Chinese to capture the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid).
Gist:
The phone, called the Huawei 4Afrika Windows Phone, will cost $150 and initially be sold in seven countries.
Slick connection, yes?
Africa is the world’s fastest-growing region for smartphones, with an average sales growth of 43 percent a year since 2000, according to the GSM Association, an industry trade group based in London.
In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 10 percent of the 445 million cellphone users have smartphones, but that is expected to increase rapidly as operators expand high-speed networks.
By 2017, most consumers in South Africa will be using smartphones, up from 20 percent last year, according to the GSM Association. In Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, the outlook for sustained growth is even greater, with smartphone penetration projected to reach just 30 percent by 2017.
The World Bank says that roughly a quarter of the one billion people on the continent are middle-class wage earners, the target group that Microsoft will try to reach with the Huawei phone, Mr. de Sousa said.
“Africans are generally quite conscious of brand, quality and image,” he said.
Some serious bottom-of-the-pyramid stuff.
Think about it: MS and Wal-Mart making these big moves in Africa.
Biggest analytic mistake I've ever made was overestimating how slowly (yes, my original post had me mis-stating this) Africa would embrace globalization and succeed with it. Totally blew it.
And that mistake taught me: the bias of the national security type toward pessimism is a huge analytic weakness WRT globalization. It really means Washington, by and large, doesn't have a clue - PNT worst of all.
And that's a weird realization, when you remember that this era of globalization is a US-led creation, but now, here we are, and the progenitor and long-time bodyguard has lost its analytic ability to understand its own creation.