There was a time back then when I walked into a store in Lagos, if i remember well, it was in the month of August 2026, which was last month as at the time of writing this article. I saw a young woman buying a Labubu plush toy. She did not know it came from
I walked through Computer Village in Ikeja last month and counted the brand names painted on the shop fronts. Tecno. Infinix. itel. Xiaomi. Oppo. Ten years ago, most of those names did not exist in Nigeria. Today, they are the first names that come to mind when a first-time buyer walks into a phone shop.
I remember the first time I held a Transsion phone in a Lagos market. The seller told me the battery would last three days on a single charge. I laughed. Then I bought it, and he was right. That moment taught me something about how Chinese brands operate. They do not win by being the
I sat across from a supplier in Guangzhou in 2019, a man who had built a small electronics business from nothing. He told me something I have never forgotten. “We do not wait for the market to be ready,” he said. “We build for the market that is coming.” That single sentence explains more about
In 2005, a Chinese company most people outside Asia had never heard of bought IBM’s personal computer division for 1.75 billion dollars. Lenovo was Asia’s biggest PC maker at the time, but globally it ranked ninth with just 2.3 percent market share. Within a decade, it stood at number one, commanding 20 percent of the
I bought my first Tecno phone in 2016 from a small shop in Onitsha main market. The seller told me it would last two years. It lasted four, and by the time I replaced it, three of my cousins had bought the same brand. That is the story of Chinese brands in Africa in miniature.
I was in Lagos last year, standing in a computer village shop in Ikeja, watching a young man unbox a Xiaomi phone. He turned it over three times, ran his thumb along the edge, and said something I still think about. “This one just feels different.” He was not talking about the processor or the
I sat in a supplier’s office in Guangzhou in late 2025, and the conversation turned to Africa. The man across the table had been exporting to Nigeria for over a decade. He pulled out a map and pointed to three cities. Lagos. Nairobi. Johannesburg. “These are not export markets anymore,” he said. “These are home
I was in a meeting with a Nigerian importer in Lagos last year when he pulled out his phone and showed me something that stopped me cold. He had ordered a custom sample of a product from a supplier in Shenzhen, paid for it through a platform I had never used, and received it in
I’m the kind of person that pays attention to even the slightest details. I remember the exact moment I realized something had shifted. It was in a phone shop in Ikeja, and a man in his fifties was asking the seller for “the Chinese one.” Not a specific brand. Not a model number. Just “the
