Onyx develops 1st African Android

Onyx develops 1st African AndroidRevving to go at N$600 Onyx is set to build the continent''s first smartphones in South Africa. The devices will run on Google''s Android platform. A Johannesburg start-up is set to become the first company ever to manufacture smartphones in Africa, taking advantage of low costs and growing local demand to build handsets, tablets and other devices based on Google Inc.''s Android system.

Onyx Connect, a privately backed company that''s raised N$150 million from investors, will begin production in the first quarter, according to Andre van der Merwe, its sales director.

The company is licensed to load Google software like Android and Chrome onto devices sold under its own brand or products it makes for others.

“We are talking to companies to manufacture handsets, laptops and possibly Android TV boxes,” Van der Merwe said in an interview. Those talks include Google itself and Johannesburg-based Vodacom Group Ltd, the South African unit of Vodafone Group Plc, he said.

Vodacom would “welcome the opportunity” to offer high-quality devices made in South Africa, Jorge Mendes, a Vodacom consumer sales and distribution executive, said in an e-mail, declining to comment on Onyx specifically.

For Google, local production would stoke a sales push in Africa, one of the few regions where it isn''t the outright browser leader. The company is setting up a distribution centre in Ethiopia within the next 12 to 18 months, Van der Merwe said. He said the project will create 600 jobs.

A drop of about 40 percent in the value of South Africa''s rand against the dollar in the past five years has helped open the door.

It is made labour less expensive in Africa''s most industrialised economy, while making phones imported from China or elsewhere in Asia harder to afford. Manufacturer subsidies have largely fallen away, limiting the availability of devices in the more-accessible price range of N$600 and below, according to Arthur Goldstuck, director of researcher World Wide Worx in Johannesburg.

“The risk with such investments is that the company is entering an industry where your marketing budget will have to be massive and you are competing with companies that have the biggest research and development spending in the world,” Goldstuck said.

“It can also be difficult to compete with economies of scale made possible by vast volumes of devices assembled in massive factories in China.”

NEWS24