Vodafone unveils two phones for emerging markets

Britain’s Vodafone Group Plc on Monday unveiled two new own-branded mobile handsets it plans to sell for $25 to $45 to boost sales in developing economies of Asia and Africa.

The world’s biggest mobile operator by sales, increasingly reliant on developing markets to drive growth, said it expected to sell over a million of the two phones within a year.

Vodafone said the phones, manufactured by Chinese handset maker ZTE Corp., would be shipped to Egypt, Romania and South Africa in the next two weeks, with 15 other markets set to follow in coming months.

The new handsets will compete with entry-level phones from Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile handset maker.

The ZTE-made phones use chipmaker Infineon Technologies’ chipset.