Ownership of mobile phones in Kenya is at 82%, and the interesting fact here is that only 19% of this is smartphones. In a day and age where developed markets have already hit mote than 50 percentage points in smartphone adoption, we have quite some miles to do. This obviously means there is quite a huge market for smartphone vendors to position themselves and get their products as the preferred ones. This came out at Huawei Ascend P7 launch last evening in Nairobi, Kenya as Huawei CEO Dean Yu read out his speech.
Huawei’s flagship smartphone of 2014 got launched on Wednesday in Nairobi, making this the second country in Africa to launch the smartphone. Ascend P7 was announced on may 7th in Paris, France and was made available in 30 countries a month later. As of yesterday the phone had been launched in 50 countries globally according to David Warui, Senior Manager, Terminals at Huawei Technologies Kenya.
Huawei is quite proud of the Ascend P7 and believes it stands a huge potential to propel the Chinese brand to greater heights within the smartphone market. The Ascend P6 sold 4 million units as at last month and Huwei has set 12 million as the 1 year sales target. The company is currently ranking third after Samsung and Apple going by IDC data of smartphone market-share globally, they shipped 13.4 million in the first quarter up from 10 million a similar quarter the previous year.
Read: Huawei Ascend P7 product information and specifications.
“Competition is stiff to say the least, but Huawei is more than up to the task. We are constantly coming up with newer and ever more agile products to site today’s consumers who are people always on the move but at the same time need to be in touch with each other,” said Dean Yu.
The Ascend P7 will sell with Safaricom and is already at the shops where the first 500 customers get the phone plus a free cover, Bluetooth Speaker and Power Bank as announced by Safaricom head of Retail, Janet Atika. The price is Kshs 55,000.
