Just like with BBK Electronics, you may have never heard of Transsion Holdings, but have bought some of their units unwittingly. Transsion Holdings is a publicly traded company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and was first established in Hong Kong in 2006. Their core products are mobile phones and communications devices.
They sell phones under the brands Infinix, Itel and Tecno. So if you see a Tecno phone competing with Infinix or Itel, then it’s just Transsion playing with itself. Though, like Oppo, Vivo, Realme and OnePlus, they are all a separate entity working on their own branding.
The company’s primary goal is to provide mobile phones for developing markets. They started first developing feature phones in African countries. Other than mobile phones, Transsion also develops IoT devices, appliances (under the Syinix branding), internet services and aftersales services (under the Carlcare brand)
According to IDC 2020, Transsion is the fourth largest in global phone manufacturing in terms of market share. They have a 10.6% overall market share with Africa and Pakistan as their biggest markets, with a 50% and 34.9% market share respectively.
In 2018, Transsion attempted to do a reverse merger, but failed. However, they did eventually become a public company and in 2019, was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange during which they provided their Initial Public Offering (IPO) and was valued around 4 Billion USD.
Their phones were accused of containing malware early 2020. Though, Transsion has already provided a fix through an OTA update.
Today, the company enjoys a high market share in Africa as well as having a healthy market share in other parts of the world including India and Southeast Asia.