ZTE Corporation, a Chinese-headquartered (Shenzhen, China) multinational telecommunications equipment and systems company which is ranked number 4 worldwide in both the smartphone and mobile phone domains as of the second quarter of year 2013, has recently made its presence felt in the Kenyan market by unveiling eight mobile devices to compete with rivals Nokia, Samsung, LG, and Tecno.
Mark Jin, ZTE Corporation’s Kenya Sales Director, spoke at the said unveiling event held at the Fairmont Norfolk Hotel in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, saying that the company will be marketing not just its entry-level, but also its high-end smartphone models in Kenya, in addition to its line of mobile broadband modems.
And this year in particular, ZTE will primarily focus on marketing three signature devices: “We are offering Kenyans two entry level smartphones, the V795 Android phone, and (Firefox OS devices) Open 2 and Nubia Z5S Mini, which is an expansion of the ZTE’s Nubia line as the high-end smartphone,” Jin said.
What is quite noteworthy about this announcement is that ZTE is not only setting its sights on the “Android” smartphone market segment in Kenya, but also on the relatively-new “Firefox-OS” market. The Open 2, it was revealed, is a phone manufactured by the company in a partnership with Mozilla Corporation, the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which are both responsible for bringing forth such software “hits” as the Mozilla Firefox and Seamonkey web browsers as well as the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client software.
The other notable smartphones that were unveiled by ZTE during the said event are the ZTE Blade L2, the Blade C2 Plus, the V829 ZTE Blade G Pro, and the V811-Kis 3. On the side, the company also introduced the MF25A, the MF65, and the MF667 modems.
Although the respective prices of the said devices were not revealed during the event, Mr. Jin did mention that the phones will be marketed mainly through a distribution chain and in partnership with Kenyan telecommunications companies and/or operators, and that an announcement with regards to their respective pricing will soon be made.
