Obi Mobile targets 5% of Kenya’s smartphone market by year-end

Obi Mobile targets to capture up to 5 per cent of the Kenyan market by end of this year.

This was said by Obi Mobile CEO John Sculley, who is also the co-founder of the Obi Mobiles as he unveiled plans for the Obi Mobile Company in Kenya and eventually in Africa.

Speaking at the event, Sculley said that the Obi Mobiles were focused on beautiful designs that are affordable to everyone especially in the emerging markets where due to larger existing mobile giants like Samsung and Microsoft Devices (formerly Nokia) and new entrants in the market, there is great competition that is propelling the growth of the smartphone market.

“We chose to have Obi Mobiles launch first in the emerging markets, as smartphones is turning out to be the most important emerging technology more than TV and what’s happening in the emerging markets is transition of feature phones to smartphones thus creating a competitive and growth in this market,” said Sculley.

Despite the cost of technology for mobile phones having gone down in emerging markets due to Chinese brands that have saturated the market, Schully pointed out that Obi Mobiles had a key focus in Africa and the Middle East, due to the large growth of the Smartphone market that grows up to 300 per cent annually.

The company also announced that they would be running a funding venture programme called Obi Ventures to tap into the start-up ecosystem that is growing in Africa.

“The biggest challenge the Kenyan start-ups are facing currently is lack of role models, something that makes Kenya different from Silicon Valley where there are a lot of people to look up to but we can address this if we have labs like the ihub where we allow the entrepreneurs to come together and network. That’s the only way we will grow and that’s why we will be running a funding venture programme called Obi Ventures to tap into the start-up ecosystem that is growing in Africa,” said Sculley.

Obi also looks at launching their products in Tanzania on Thursday then move to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the rest of southern Africa in April before setting a focus on Latin America.

He also pointed out that since they launched Obi products in the UAE markets six months ago they reported a 4.3 per cent market share by end of the year and hoped that Obi Mobiles would also pick up the same in the Kenyan Market.

Currently Obi has released only six designs of Obi Mobiles in the market targeting both high end users and low end users, but looks forward to launching more designs by mid this year. The Obi phones come enabled with the Android Operating System.