Stonebwoy and Mr Maxwell Techie
MAXWELL TECHIE, CEO of Mobile Zone, sole distributors of Tecno phones in Ghana, was honored at this year’s Ghana Information Technology and Telecom Awards (GITTA) for his “Outstanding Contribution to the Mobile Phone Industry.
Additionally, Tecno was adjudged the Smartphone Brand of the Year and Mobile Zone walked away with the Phone Distributor of the Year award.
For Tecno and Mobile Zone, they have always won the same awards since the inception of the GITTAs in 2013. But for Maxwell Techie, this is the first time he has been honored for his massive contribution to the mobile phone industry in Ghana and Africa, and this award is long overdue.
The man, who is fondly described by his industry colleagues as ‘the father of mobile phone industry in Ghana’, is the first to win this prestigious award for his many years of driving smartphone penetration growth in Ghana by dint of hard work and consistency.
Mr Techie took the risk and blazed the trail with affordable Chinese phones when many Ghanaians were used to Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Ericsson, LG and Blackberry phones. At the time, people had no interest in Chinese phones because they were seen as cheap, with no swag and of low quality.
The Tecno CEO and his colleagues in the mobile phone industry, at the time, used to import and sell refurbished phones from Hong Kong and UK because Ghanaians could not afford brand new phones.
But Maxwell Techie stepped out of the crowd and went into a relationship with the Chinese manufacturers of Tecno phone, Transsion Technology, to develop a tailor-made brand for the Ghanaian and African market.
“My relationship with Transsion Technology goes beyond being just a distributor of Tecno – I was there from day one when Tecno was born and I made significant input into the making of Tecno – I told them what features Ghanaians and Africans love and they included it in developing the brand.
“I suggested the inclusion of a number of features based on my market research on Ghana,” Maxwell Techie recalled in an exclusive interview with TechGH24.
Today, Mobile Zone is the only phone distributor in Ghana that has exclusive Tecno shops across all 16 regions of Ghana.
A business desk report