ZTE may not make the type of handsets that IntoMobile readers lust after, but they do serve markets such as India and Africa where a $150 smartphone provides the first genuine internet experience that many people have only read about in newspapers and magazines. The Chinese firm just posted their Q1 2011 financial results and while ZTE didn’t comment on the exact number of mobile phones shipped, they did say that they sold 51% more than they did during the same quarter last year. Earlier this year ZTE announced that they plan on selling 12 million smarpthones in 2011, up from 3 million in 2010, so while a 51% rate of growth in Q1 is impressive, they’re going to have to pick up the pace to achieve their goals. We’ve got no doubt in our minds that they’re going to do it however since operators are increasingly picking up devices like the ZTE Blade, an ultra cheap Android 2.2 smartphone, to sell to prepaid customers. Feature phones, aka dumb phones, just don’t make anymore sense in today’s market. Other important numbers include a profit of $19.4 million, up from $16.8 million during the same quarter last year, and an operating revenue of $2.3 billion, which is up from $2.02 billion a year ago.
You’ve really got to hand it to Google, because thanks to Android companies like ZTE, Huawei, and countless others, are now entering the mobile phone space in earnest, providing customers an experience that they could get with competing brands, but at a far less cost thanks to cheap labor and government subsidies. We hope that by the end of this decade a Chinese brand will appear with global recognition similar to that of Nokia, Nike, and Coca-Cola, because while we enjoy the fact that cheap handsets of dubious build quality are connecting millions, we’d like to start seeing some real innovation coming from the Far East.