In his roadside electronics store in Shahganj, a small town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Pankaj Kesari prominently displays boxes of popular phone brands like Samsung, Xiaomi, and the Reliance-owned Jio. But lately, many of his customers have opted for a much lesser-known brand called Tecno.

Kesari’s customers prefer Tecno phones because they feel the brand offers them more value for money, he told Rest of World. Tecno’s popular Spark Go 2024 model, priced at around 7,000 rupees ($85), has three cameras, and features similar to an iPhone. “Customers with a higher budget don’t come to us. They go to big retailers to buy Samsung, Oppo, Vivo,” Kesari said.

Tecno is owned by the Shenzhen-headquartered Transsion Holdings, the fifth-largest smartphone seller globally. Over the past year, Transsion has emerged as a contender in the competitive Indian market — where other Chinese heavyweights like Xiaomi and BBK Electronics have been fiercely battling for nearly a decade. Besides Tecno, Transsion sells smartphones in India under its Itel and Infinix brands — some of the Itel phones are iPhone lookalikes.

Transsion, which also leads smartphone sales in other South Asian countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, has doubled down on launching more affordable but sleek devices in India over the past year. It has also ramped up marketing and hired top Bollywood celebrities to endorse its brands.

The strategy seems to be paying off already. Transsion’s profits in India nearly doubled year-on-year in the 2023 financial year to 210 crore rupees ($25 million), according to data sourced from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Last year, the company also gained 8.6% of the Indian smartphone market, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research.

“Transsion sets itself apart in the affordable segment by offering essential features and specs, including 5G cellular technology and increased RAM [or a device’s short-term memory bank],” Shilpi Jain, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, told Rest of World. “[Transsion] products are good [and their] numbers are rising, because people are finding great value in their products,” a senior Jio executive told Rest of World, requesting anonymity as they were not allowed to speak with the media.

Transsion is popularly known as the “Smartphone King of Africa,” due to its remarkable 40% market share on the continent, gained through affordable pricing and a strong distribution network. The company is now trying to replicate its Africa success story in other markets like India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America by using similar tactics. “We want to sell a phone that’s more accessible, so our phones have great specs — like a long-lasting battery,” Antonio Tercero, Infinix’s country manager in Mexico, had previously told Rest of World.

One of Transsion’s winning strategies in Africa was that it tweaked its devices to local requirements. It launched a four-SIM feature, which allowed users to insert multiple SIM cards into a single phone and switch between them depending on network availability.

Between 2016 and 2017, the company set up a manufacturing unit in Noida, India, and hired a local leadership team that understood the market, according to multiple former and current Transsion executives who spoke to Rest of World. Seventy percent of Transsion smartphones made in India are manufactured at the Noida plant, and the rest by Dixon Technologies and BPL, two Transsion executives in the sales and product development teams told Rest of World, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to talk to the media. “There are some models which we specifically design for the India market to deliver for consumer needs or compete against dominant models from competition,” one of them said.

In 2017, Transsion launched five smartphone models in India with biometric touch sensors that function even with oily fingers. This was done in keeping with Indians’ propensity to use their hands for eating.

But from then on, until early 2023, Transsion was prudent about launching new models and marketing its brands in India. The company wanted to hedge risks and launch affordable devices that met country-specific requirements, a senior Itel executive told Rest of World, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media. “In terms of product launches, Transsion brands are conservative,” the senior Jio executive said. “They are slow with new model launches, yet they are building up properly.”

But this changed last year.

In the first eight months of 2023, the company launched 17 Tecno models, with plans to launch 13 more, according to Arijeet Talapatra, the company’s India CEO. Transsion also launched the country’s most affordable 5G phone late last year, under the Itel brand.

Xiaomi, with its brands Poco and Redmi, and BBK Electronics, with its RealMe model, have long led India’s affordable smartphone industry. As they focus on expanding further in the country, they’re building out their portfolio in more premium segments, telecom analyst Ajay Sharma told Rest of World. This move towards “premiumization” — boosted by regulatory pressures from Indian law enforcement — has opened up the floor for Transsion to slide in “at the right time, filling up the space vacated by the established Chinese manufacturers,” said Sharma, who previously led sales divisions at smartphone companies Micromax and HTC.

To increase its visibility, Transsion doubled its marketing spend last year, a former Tecno executive told Rest of World, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to publicly share this information.

In 2023, Transsion hired top Bollywood celebrities, Deepika Padukone and Hrithik Roshan, as brand ambassadors for Tecno and Itel, respectively. The company also dedicated resources to rebranding at least one Delhi Metro station, now named “Laxmi Nagar Tecno,” and placed multiple billboards of Padukone promoting the Tecno Camon 20 in the vicinity.

Transsion’s focus on smaller towns and cities has been a key ingredient for its success in India. “The youth in metros are brand conscious, and hence Transsion started looking for distributors beyond metro cities,” Sharma said.

To execute this strategy, Transsion offered a higher margin to retailers, two smartphone distributors told Rest of World. According to Kamran, a distributor in Uttar Pradesh, Transsion offers retailers a 5% margin on each device — which is considerably higher than the 3.5% they get on Xiaomi’s Mi phones and the 2.5% they make on Samsung’s devices.

Smartphones in the affordable category — priced below $120 — account for 30% of all smartphone sales in India, Upasana Joshi, senior analyst at global market intelligence firm IDC, told Rest of World. Nearly 80% of Transsion’s smartphone sales are in this segment, she said.

In August 2023, Transsion expressed a desire to break into the list of India’s top five smartphone brands. The company hopes to achieve this goal with a “premium approach” — alongside its focus on affordability — where it plans to launch new devices ranging from $240 all the way up to $1,200. Transsion has also made its Tecno and Itel phones available to buy online; the brands were previously only sold in physical stores.

Telecom experts told Rest of World this is the right strategy, because a company needs to expand its footprint across all price points to establish itself as a recognized brand in India. But Transsion has, in the recent past, struggled to compete in segments beyond the $180 mark, according to telecom analyst Sharma.

Last year, the company laid off 200 sales staff deployed at retail shops, who had been hired to promote mid-segment smartphones, the former Tecno executive said. “Transsion needs to build up brand value if it has to fight brands such as Samsung, Vivo, Oppo” in pricier segments, because their “branding is unparalleled,” Sharma said. “The shopkeepers won’t give priority to Tecno as much as they do to the other brands like Samsung and Vivo.”