LOAD UP: Chinese made mobile phones are all the rage in Africa (MAO SIQIAN)

When Guan Yazhou visited Tanzania's Kariakoo market for the first time in late 2009, he couldn't help but be impressed. Today, the 29-year-old mobile phone engineer can still remember how surprised he was at seeing the extent to which Tecno, a Chinese mobile phone brand, had blanketed the area in advertising material.  

"It was up on posters, billboards and every shop's doors and windows," Guan told ChinAfrica. "In my eyes, it was literally an exhibition fair for Tecno products."

Guan said if he had not witnessed the branding efforts himself, he would never truly understand how popular Chinese made mobile phones are on the African market.

Big sellers

However, before his visit to Kariakoo, Guan had heard a lot about the "Huaqiangbei story," which tells of the lucrative mobile phone business between Chinese wholesalers and wholesale buyers from across the African continent.

Huaqiangbei, a commercial district located in Shenzhen City of south China's Guangdong Province, is known as the largest electronic and digital products trading center in China. Data by PConline.com, one of the country's leading digital products information providers, shows that Huaqiangbei's annual sales total 25 billion yuan ($3.75 billion), of which one fifth comes from electronic products like mobile phones.

"It is a magic place for buyers. I've never failed to find anything on my shopping list there," Jemi Okpara told ChinAfrica. Born in Kenya, the 33-year-old has been buying mobile phones from the Huaqiangbei market since 2007 and distributing the products to retailers from different African countries.  

According to Okpara, his average monthly shipment ranges from 50,000 to 80,000 units, rising to 100,000 in the busy season, which usually lasts from July to December.

"Walking around at Huaqiangbei, people can easily come across several African faces. Some of them even speak perfect Chinese when bargaining with local dealers. They are all looking for fast sellers in their home market," Okpara added.

An employee of a logistics company headquartered in Shenzhen and specializing in Sino-African trade, said some big clients would ship 100,000 mobile phones a week to Africa, which makes their monthly shipment total four times that of Okpara's.

Industry insiders estimated that as of the end of September 2009, more than 3 million mobile phones made in China were shipped from Shenzhen to Africa each month and the figure has kept rising steadily.

Latest report from the Informa Telecoms & Media (ITM), a world-leading consultancy to global telecoms and media markets, shows that by the third quarter of 2010, the number of mobile phone users in Africa had climbed 18 percent year on year to reach 506 million, accounting for 10 percent of the world's total.

The ITM report also said that the African continent has become one of the regions with the most rapid growth in mobile phone users in the world. It forecasts that by 2015, some countries like Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea and Madagascar will see a growth over 100 percent in the number of mobile phone users.