Funtrench Journal

By Sketch.

The iPad has sold over 1 million units in about 3 months.  It is not that iPad is the best, neither is it the cheapest, but people still buy; this is the same case with the iPhone. China already has clones to the iPad currently being sold in Kenya, going by names such as MiD and Cynovo. Kenyans as usual term them as low quality cheap Chinese imports. Retailing at prices lower than what the iPad, they are probably better options than the iPad. Riddled with more features than the original iPad, these gadgets might just outdo the iPad in Kenya. But are Chinese products “cheap low quality imports”?

We may despise Chinese products as “cheap and low quality” but think again:

• China has the highest number of engineers graduating annually (estimates are at 600,000 per annum – Bloomberg Business Week)

• China has the largest population (standing at 1,338,612,968 as at 2009 – Internet World Stats)

These two facts mean that China has the largest number of technically innovative minds with the largest ready market for any country in the world. We hear the funny ringtones from Tecno, G-Tide among other Chinese phones and think less about the people who made them. Maybe the quality is low, but remember these people were able to make and export these products to us.

What electronic or technical product have we made as Kenyans and sold to China?

The country we despise as producing low quality stuff is the same that is now funding and even executing some of our biggest development projects, perhaps the most widely known being Thika highway upgrade (costing about 32 Billion Shillings). The contractors were not selected because they are Chinese, but because they were qualified and have proven to have better work ethics than most African contractors. What can be said about Kenyan contractors and engineers?

We need to reach a point that we are so confident of our products that we can dare sell them to the developed world (think M-PESA and the like). The Chinese engineers are so good they can clone a Nokia and one would be unable to tell the difference, sometimes the clone having better features than the original phone. I accept the fact that there are low quality products from China, but is it the Chinese who bring them to Kenya, or is it Kenyan traders who buy the low quality stuff from China?

With a greater capacity to invent, China is overtaking the rest of the world as a technology hub, and we should not be caught watching. Those who accuse China of low quality stuff should try getting one high quality product from there, it will give them a different opinion. I have a Chinese computer, bought in 2003, and it still works today without any of its hardware ever failing. I’m satisfied with the service it gives me. There are quality Chinese products out there, just look keenly. We should stop the culture of always looking for the cheapest product available, and perhaps consider the quality that lies in the products that are sometimes wrongly deemed “expensive“.