IPO Preview | The Second Evolution of “The King of Africa”: Communication Holdings Goes Public in Hong Kong, Opening a New Chapter in AI and Intelligent Ecosystems

Recently, Voice Holdings, known as the “King of Africa” in the mobile phone industry, officially submitted an H share listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange six years after successfully landing on the Science and Technology Innovation Board.

As the world's leading smart terminal and mobile Internet service provider, Voice has built competitive barriers in target markets through highly localized technological innovation and multi-brand matrices through its deep focus on emerging markets such as Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

The current H-share listing is not only to diversify financing channels and optimize the capital structure, but also to raise capital to support its strategic transformation into an intelligent ecosystem service provider covering multiple business sectors such as mobile internet services, energy storage, and electric mobility. With this listing in Hong Kong, how will Communication Holdings draw its second growth curve driven by technological innovation?

Stable Market Share and Performance Under Pressure: Finding Certainty Amidst Cyclical Fluctuations

The Zhitong Finance App learned that since deepening its involvement in emerging markets such as Africa in 2013, Communication Holdings has quickly established a dominant position in the industry with deep insight into the needs of local users and a multi-brand operating model, and is known as the “King of Africa”.

According to Frost & Sullivan statistics, in terms of 2024 mobile phone sales, Voice is the world's largest mobile phone provider in emerging markets, with a market share of 24.1%. In its traditional dominant region, the company's share of the African market reached 61.5%, while also ranking first in the emerging Asia-Pacific market and the Middle East market.

The strong market position guaranteed the company's continued growth during its track record. Its total revenue rose steadily from RMB 46.596 billion in 2022 to RMB 68.715 billion in 2024, and profit during the year also increased sharply from RMB 2,467 billion in 2022 to RMB 5.597 billion in 2024.

However, in the first half of 2025, the company's performance fluctuated. Revenue fell from RMB 34.6 billion to RMB 29.1 billion in the same period in 2024, and gross margin also fell from 20.8% to 19.0%, mainly due to adjustments in the smartphone product release cycle and increased competition in emerging markets.

Faced with these challenges, the company continued to increase R&D investment to maintain technological leadership. In 2024, R&D expenditure reached RMB 2,517 billion, accounting for 3.7% of total revenue, and further increased to 4.7% in the first half of 2025 to ensure a differentiated competitive advantage for products.

Communication Holdings is seeking an H-share listing. The core purpose is to broaden fund-raising channels, optimize capital structures, and provide sufficient financial guarantees for its continued expansion in emerging Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Latin American markets outside of Africa to support it to continuously replicate Africa's success stories in these regions and achieve sustainable global market share growth.

Can energy storage and electric mobility become the next “miracle of growth”?

From a long-term perspective, Communication Holdings' future growth strategy is based on its strong mobile phone business, transforming from a hardware sales model to building an intelligent ecosystem driven by mobile internet services and diversified IoT products.

The implementation of this strategy is based on structural opportunities in emerging markets around the world. According to F&S analysis, emerging markets are the main driving force for the growth of the global mobile phone market. The mobile phone market size is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.7% from 2024 to 2029, higher than the 4.6% level expected by the global market during the same period.

Among them, growth is mainly due to rising per capita disposable income, huge population base, and continued acceleration in smartphone penetration in emerging markets. The smartphone penetration rate in emerging markets is expected to further increase to 85.4% by 2029.

The core of Communication Holdings's transformation from pure hardware sales to an intelligent ecosystem with mobile phones as the core and collaborative development of multiple businesses is to use its huge user base as a traffic entry point to promote the development of high-growth services and products.

Among them, in terms of mobile internet services, Communication Holdings is based on the self-developed Voice OS. For the six months ending June 30, 2025, the average monthly active users exceeded 270 million. Its application portfolio includes the application distribution platform Palm Store, the music platform Boomplay jointly incubated with NetEase, and Phoenix, a content distribution platform jointly developed with Tencent.

Currently, although mobile internet services have a high gross profit margin of 78.0% in the first half of 2025, their contribution to total revenue is still low, accounting for 1.4% in the first half of 2025.

In terms of IoT products and other businesses, the company actively lays out an emerging high-growth circuit. The product portfolio includes laptops, smart wearables, and home appliances. Among them, TWS headsets ranked first in the African market in terms of revenue in 2024.

In addition, another prominent strategic focus is energy storage products and light electric mobility devices. According to the Zhitong Finance App, in response to the pain point of unstable electricity supply in Africa, Voice launched the itel Energy and DyQue Energy dual brands to provide energy storage products such as hybrid inverters, lithium battery modules, and photovoltaic modules.

In addition, the company also launched RevOO for individual users and TankVolt for commercial users, including two- and three-wheeled electric mobility devices. According to F&S forecasts, the market size of mobile internet services, IoT products, energy storage products, and lightweight electric mobility devices in emerging markets around the world is expected to grow rapidly at compound annual growth rates of 26.9%, 19.4%, 16.4%, and 15.6%, respectively, from 2024 to 2029.

To support this ecological chain reshaping and technological leadership, Communication plans to raise funds for AI-related technologies, including strengthening basic AI capabilities, developing AI assistants and AI agents, upgrading transmission OS, and strengthening mobile phone imaging capabilities, indicating that the company is using AI technology as the core driving force for future product iteration and differentiated competition.

However, although the growth prospects for emerging businesses are broad, their contribution to overall revenue will take time to be verified, and promoting electric vehicles and energy storage equipment in markets such as Africa still needs to overcome challenges such as infrastructure construction. The transformation path of this long-term layout is still yet to be verified by the market.