THE RETURN OF MOTOROLA

At its height, Motorola was King in Kenya.

From its talkabout, to its RAZR platform, its kabambe phones and the like, Motorola was the market leader in Kenya. It particularly excelled at pushing low-cost handsets that grew wildly popular but returned very low margins.

An ex-motorola man now at Samsung East Africa says the move to push these cheap phones eventually proved to be Motorola's undoing and by 2007 its fortunes had dwindled badly.

The inventor of the mobile phone is back again though: One Wednesday, 27 October, Motorola will hold a media roundtable to unveil its line of products.

The handset maker comes remade and comes to a market that has itself been remade by the rise of the smartphone industry and the penetration of mobile internet with the rise in popularity of social networking and other data consuming online activities.

During that time, it caught the Android bug and has unveiled its popular Droid line of phones. It will hope to ride on both the affluence of a budding middle-class, its Android platform and the availability of a range of applications on the Android Store, and its brand name recognizability to recapture market share.

In the meantime, Nokia remains runaway leader with 40 per cent of the pie, Samsung second at 8 per cent, and the others bring up the rear.

Just last month, another pioneer in these parts, Sony Ericsonn announced its return to the Kenyan market.