Page 58 - AIB | The Chanel | Issue 1 2012

The brain behind Mi-Fone is Alpesh Patel, a
seasoned telecoms professional who saw a gap in
the market for a mobile devices brand which
caters to the mass market in emerging territories.
Launched in 2008, the African start-up turns being
small into a distinct advantage and is now
positioning itself for massive growth as 700m
Africans are yet to connect to the internet, the
majority via mobile devices. What is Mi-Fone's
unique selling point?
he mobile devices market is probably the most cut‐throat
and the most competitive business on the planet today
but we had a very specific vision in mind: to focus on a
certain segment of the market that just was not addressed
by the big brands – the African mass market consumer.
Today inAfrica in the top tier youʹll have BlackBerry, Nokia,
a little bit of Apple, the mid‐tier is controlled by Samsung,
and in the lower tiers which in the past were mainly controlled by Nokia
and Motorola, there is Alcatel, Huawei, and a local brand like Mi‐Fone.
You also have a lot of cheap fake Chinese phones entering the market.
We had to work very hard to get our positioning right, so from day one
weʹve always controlled our distribution and whatever profits we made
we invested back into building the brand and customer service. Today we
are dealing with about seven operators on the continent, and they buy Mi‐
Fone because we give them a customised solution. We were probably the
first manufacturer to offer co‐branded solutions, offering the mobile screen
as the mobile billboard to the operators seeing that they now also want to
promote their operator branded services.
We worked on very low minimum order quantities to put your name
on our phone – starting at only 3,000 units. We used being small to our
advantage ‐ a David in a field of Goliaths who is small enough to run
between their legs. We go to the operators saying ʹContinue doing your
Nokias and Samsungs, let Mi‐Fone be the gap‐fillerʹ. We must be doing
something right, just look at the fantastic partnerships that we have in
place today – the only free licence in Africa from Norwegian company
Opera, partnerships with low cost chip set provider Mediatek and with
Qualcomm to drive 3G.
What's the potential?
Today you have an average voice penetration of 40% in Africa, that means
more than 300m people still have to connect to voice, but the most interesting
statistic is that out of 800m people today on the continent only 5% have
internet access. So 700m are yet to get connected to the internet – and for
the majority the only way they are going to be able to access the internet is
through low cost data enabled devices. And they will want content
relevant to their lifestyle – not Russian content or Chinese content but
applications regarding health, agriculture, the latest sports, the latest
entertainment, the latest regional music, and this is the natural evolution
of our brand. Mi‐Fone has laid the foundation with the handsets, now we
are moving into applications and content. We were invited by Google to
showcase our apps store at one of their events in Cape Town in
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