Re:Ghana will no longer sell cocoa to Switzerland
by jorblumesea on Friday March 19, 2021 @12:01PM
(#26514914)
I think it's also fair to note that "Africa" is a huge place with huge income distributions. I can see South Africa and North Africa aligning more with the West, and East Africa going more to China.
They're going to try to compete on price and quality. If customers think that the Xiaomi phone is good and cheap, the governments will have a hard time banning it. Customers don't really care about turning over huge amounts of information to Tiktok as well as to Facebook. That puts the western governments in a bind, to either ban wholesale or piecemeal, and it looks bad for them either way.
That's not a guaranteed win for China. It's hard to compete on both price and quality, and they're going to have to work hard to win a reputation for the latter. It's possible: both Japan and South Korea have done it. But they did so with a friendly US, not a hostile one.
They have the advantage of an enormous internal market, but it's not a wealthy one. They're going to look to Africa, which is also not wealthy, but there is money there, with less focus on privacy and more on price. Perhaps India and Latin America as well.