6 Chinese Manufacturers Who Want to Make Your Next Smartphone

Increasingly, Chinese manufacturers are breaking away from being OEMs and are also casting off the shoddy mantle of making shanzhai – fake, or low-rent – gadgets. That’s because the likes of OPPO, Tian Hua, ZTE, and many more, are aiming to make your next smartphone. In so doing, these ‘designed in China, made in China’ companies are hoping to emulate – and then topple – the likes of HTC (TPE:2498) and Samsung (SEO:005930).

And thanks to both Android and WP7, they have a chance of being the smartphone that more people in the US and Europe slip into their pockets.

Here are six Chinese brands who’re now pushing, and enhancing, their smartphone range more aggressively:

OPPO

(Image source: Engadget)

The Donguan-based OPPO sure likes ambitious marketing, recruiting Hong Kong starlets and even Hollywood heart-throbs for its marketing campaigns. But aside from those clever campaigns, its phones have been lacklustre, and its brand-name is still as low as it can go among Chinese consumers.

But its Android-powered X903 showed potential (pictured above), and it looks like it could find a niche – with later iterations – on American or US telcos as a budget smartphone for those who love hard keyboards.

Tian Hua

Tian Hua has been nicely cashing-in on its W700 smartphone (pictured above) this year, manufacturing it for Alibaba as the first Aliyun phone, for China Unicom (HKG:0762; NYSE:CHU) as a mid-range carrier device, and soon for the Indian telco Micromax.

Now that it has found its stride, it’s a contender for pushing further overseas – although it shows no sign of doing so yet.