[SeekAndFind]

Rwanda opens 'first entirely homemade' smartphone factory in Africa

Africa's largest smartphone maker is Transsion, a Chinese company dominating the continent with its Tecno brand. The Shenzhen-based company doesn't do business in China, despite being based there but it controls a huge part of the smartphone market in Africa, where it has more than 50% marketshare.

Rwanda's ICT Minister Paula Ingabire hopes the plant can play a role in creating jobs and developing skills.

"This plant will hire and train professionals for higher-skilled manufacturing jobs," she told CNN. The number of employees is projected to rise from around 200 to more than 500 by its fifth year of operation. The minister also expects domestic production to increase smartphone penetration by "at least 10%," which will improve access to services and "drive financial inclusion in rural communities through mobile financial services."

The factory currently employs around 200 people, of which 90% are Rwandan and 60% are women.

Ingabire adds that the Mara plant will complement the government's ambitious Digital Ambassadors Program, which aims to achieve 100% digital literacy among youths aged 16-30 and for 60% of the adult population by 2024.

[TigersEye]

[Terabitten]

Good lord, did anyone actually READ the article?

These are not Chinese parts assembled in Africa. These are almost entirely African-made phones. The Chinese Tecno phones are their biggest competition.

Based on the spec sheet, they appear to be pretty decent phones. They use Qualcomm chips (Korean, not Chinese). They spec out as comparable to a Samsung A10 (not S10) but it’s pretty impressive given all that Rwanda has been through since 1994.

Good on Rwanda. I hope for their continued economic success.

[Jonty30]

I admire their ambition and wish them the best of luck.

[Spruce]

This is very, very cool. Good for them. Anyone that can claw back their own independence has my best wishes.

[Ciaphas Cain]

Seems like just last week that Rwanda was a place of genocide and atrocity. That was in 1994.

This sounds like an incredible turnaround.

If this kind of technological and commercial progress can take place in Rwanda, it can elsewhere in Africa.

I hope they have all the best.

[norcal joe]

Rwanda just released the first smartphone made entirely in Africa.

So they manufacture the Qualcomm MSM8940 10nm Snapdragon chipset in Rwanda that the phone uses? I don't think so.

Therefore the headline, and also saying that "those companies [in other African countries] all import the components. But at Mara, they manufacture the phones from the motherboards to the packaging," is rather misleading.

[BeauBo]

Rwanda is kind of a garden spot in East Africa - a nice place to visit.

Chinese businessmen do a lot of business in Africa, and have established significant manufacturing operations in nearby Ethiopia. Some of it is strategic, directed by the communist party, but some of it is businessmen coming to Africa to get out from under the iron grip of the Party.

Overall, things are changing quickly in Africa. Ten of the top ten fastest growing cities in the world are in Africa. They have a young and fast growing population.
It is the last great frontier for low cost labor, and the last frontier for lifting significant percentages of the population up from extreme poverty (which is underway).

The African Union is adopting common market business regulations, that make their unified market big enough to start being really (realistically) interesting to multi-nationals. There are some particular success stories around the continent, like Ethiopia and Botswana. Ethiopia has enjoyed double digit growth rates for its GDP, for most of the last 20 years - sometimes called the “African Lion” economy.

As a continent, Africa has about 1.3 billion people, but a dis-proportionally large amount of land, natural resources, and higher GDP growth rates than most of the world. The World Bank estimates that Africa will reach middle income status (on average) around 2025. It could well become a major engine for global growth over the next decade.

[bray]

It looks a lot like a drum.

[Centurion2000]

Good for them. Looks like it’s about 2 or 3 generations out of state of the art but it’s MUCH better than landlines and hopefully brings the technology to the last billion or so people in dire poverty.

[Husker24]

Rwanda is actually a fairly bright spot in Africa, it looks like its trying to crawl out of shithole status which is amazing considering they were chopping each other up by the 100s of thousands with machetes 30 years ago.

[lee martell]

Good for them. As Celine Dion once said: “Let dem haff nice tings!”

[Rastus]

Fake news. Wakanda built the first all-African smartphone while whitey was still using quill pens.

[Phil DiBasquette]

When Hutu Met Tutsi

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

But the only ringtone one can get is ;

Toot, toot, Tutsi, good-bye!
Toot, toot, Tutsi, don’t cry

[Tijeras_Slim]

Can the Hutu’s get one with a machete app?