Munyaradzi Gwatidzo, the star of African mobile telephones

For Munyaradzi Gwatidzo, entrepreneurship was initially really about survival. With no one to take care of Gwatidzo and his siblings, they learnt to fend for themselves.

“We were always thrown out of school because we hadn’t paid school fees. I had to sell to survive – fish, tomatoes, pepper. That’s where the entrepreneurial spirit came from. After secondary school, the most important thing was to make money to look after myself and my older sister, then a single mother with two kids. So at 19, I started to work as bank clerk.” he tells me.

With the advent of mobile telephony in Zimbabwe came an influx of mobile handsets. But there were no mobile phone repairers. Sensing an opportunity, Gwatidzo took it upon himself to become ‘the chief technician of mobile phones in Harare’ as a way to supplement his income from the bank. He would rip apart phones, and put them back together to learn he could about phones.

Eventually, he would buy faulty phones which after repairing, he’d go on to sell in Zambia. After work each Friday, he would make the six-plus hour bus journey to Lusaka, returning to Harare on Monday morning in time to shower and go to work. He started in Zambia because at the time the US Dollar was the currency in use, providing a better hedge than the Zimbabwean dollar.

Moving to China

But Gwatidzo’s dream was bigger. He wanted to develop mobile phones that met the needs of average Africans. In pursuit of this dream, he set off for China. At the time, the radio was the only standard mobile phone feature and in many households in Zimbabwe the mobile phone doubled as the household radio, around which friends and family huddled to catch up on news and events. Yet, the volume on the average mobile phone made listening difficult. Clearly, the developers of those phones hadn’t anticipated such use.

While in China, Gwatidzo persuaded a Chinese manufacturer to develop and produce a range of mobile phones with a speaker loud enough to enable the phone play its role as default household radio. He also persuaded the manufacturer to agree to pre-finance the cost of these handsets. It was only after he had received them in Zimbabwe and had sold them that Gwatidzo would send the money to the manufacturer.

Failed collaboration

After a while, the manufacturer sent a representative to Zimbabwe to better understand the market and to see how they could collaborate with Gwatidzo to maximize opportunities and profits. Together, they agreed to set up a joint venture company to sell of its own branded G-Tide phones.

The joint venture though was to become Gwatidzo’s undoing.

Although he’d operated under the belief that he was a part owner of the company, he wasn’t. His partners had ensured his name was not on the company documents and there was no written agreement in place. When sales hit 50,000 a month his partners kicked him out and argued successfully in court that Gwatidzo had no stake in the business.”

Starting a new dream

He left with nothing, leaving behind everything he had worked hard to build, but he decided to channel his anger into another brand (G-mobile) to compete with G-Tide. However, he made a fatal mistake of burdening the company with extortionate interest rate loans.

When he defaulted on the loans, his lenders foreclosed on his assets. He tells me “I lost mynice five bedroom house. My wife and I had to share a one-bedroom apartment with two others - we slept in living room. In the street, they ‘dissed me’ and there were newspaper headlines saying I was overambitious. It was an embarrassment, in the community, in the country. I didn’t leave the apartment for three weeks”

At this point, he considered giving up entrepreneurship completely to return to banking.

It was his wife’s encouragement that led him to start Astro Mobile. “Astro” because the plan was for the business to shine bright in Africa and beyond”.

Nigel Chanakira, a Zimbabwean investor, believed in Gwatidzo and his vision so much that he invested about one million US dollars in the business. And provided Gwatidzo with much needed coaching and mentoring.

Today, Astro is a USD 100 million star dazzling customers all across Africa with a range of mobile devices designed specifically with the African consumer in mind. The $60 Astrobox, perhaps the ‘world’s cheapest computer, turns any television into a PC and doubles as a wireless router.

Remarkably, Astro devices are designed and developed by its team of technology enthusiasts in Harare and built either in one of its factories in Zimbabwe or China. And Gwatidzo through his charitable trust has over 1,000 orphans in school.

Having recently ventured into consumer electronics with a smart LED television manufacturing plant in Zimbabwe, Gwatidzo has his sights set firmly on a listing on New York Stock Exchange, something I’m confident will materialize one day very soon.