I held a chip in my hand last year in Shenzhen that should not exist. It was a Huawei Kirin 9030, fabricated by SMIC on a 5 nanometer class process, and it was made without the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that every industry expert said were essential. The engineer who showed it to me smiled
I walked into a home in Lekki last month and the lights came on before I touched a switch. The air conditioner adjusted itself. The curtains closed on their own. The owner, a Nigerian businessman in his forties, smiled and said something that has stayed with me. “I did not plan this. I bought one
I sat in traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge last year and counted the cars around me. Hundreds of them, all burning petrol, all contributing to the haze that hangs over Lagos most mornings. Then I noticed something that stopped me. A small blue hatchback with no exhaust pipe, gliding silently through the gridlock. It
I watched a robot walk across a stage in Beijing last month and beat Usain Bolt’s 100 metre world record. It clocked 9.39 seconds. The crowd cheered, cameras flashed, and the clip went viral within hours. But the moment that stayed with me came later, when I read what actually happened after the applause. That
I stood in a rice field outside Kano last year and watched a drone rise into the air. The farmer beside me, a man in his fifties who had spent his whole life working the land with a hoe and a handheld sprayer, watched it with the same expression I imagine his grandfather wore when
There was a time back then when I walked into a store in Lagos, if i remember well, it was in the month of August 2026, which was last month as at the time of writing this article. I saw a young woman buying a Labubu plush toy. She did not know it came from
I walked through Computer Village in Ikeja last month and counted the brand names painted on the shop fronts. Tecno. Infinix. itel. Xiaomi. Oppo. Ten years ago, most of those names did not exist in Nigeria. Today, they are the first names that come to mind when a first-time buyer walks into a phone shop.
I remember the first time I held a Transsion phone in a Lagos market. The seller told me the battery would last three days on a single charge. I laughed. Then I bought it, and he was right. That moment taught me something about how Chinese brands operate. They do not win by being the
I sat across from a supplier in Guangzhou in 2019, a man who had built a small electronics business from nothing. He told me something I have never forgotten. “We do not wait for the market to be ready,” he said. “We build for the market that is coming.” That single sentence explains more about
In 2005, a Chinese company most people outside Asia had never heard of bought IBM’s personal computer division for 1.75 billion dollars. Lenovo was Asia’s biggest PC maker at the time, but globally it ranked ninth with just 2.3 percent market share. Within a decade, it stood at number one, commanding 20 percent of the
