From about 2005 onwards, the Korean brands that had displaced the Japanese were themselves displaced — by Hisense, TCL, Haier, Skyworth, Midea, Changhong and a long tail of unbranded Shenzhen and Guangzhou factories selling under whatever name the importer printed on the box. By 2020, Chinese manufacturers held an estimated 55–65% of new-television sales in Nigeria, 70%+ of new air-conditioner sales, and nearly the entire ₦5,000–₦40,000 small-appliance tier (blenders, irons, kettles, fans, rechargeable lamps).
The shift was driven by three convergent forces. First, the WTO accession of China in 2001 and the build-out of Pearl River Delta panel and compressor capacity dropped the wholesale price of a 32-inch LCD panel from about $480 in 2005 to under $90 by 2015. Second, the Lagos importer-finance ecosystem — letters of credit through Zenith, GTBank and Access (see Banks · Act VI) — let Alaba and Computer Village merchants finance container-loads on 60-to-90-day terms. Third, brand-agnostic Nigerian consumer behaviour: surveys by Philips Consulting and Jumia in 2014 and 2019 found that fewer than 12% of Nigerian appliance buyers could name the country of origin of their refrigerator, and the brand premium they were willing to pay for Samsung or LG over Hisense or Haier was under 8%.
The inverter-and-solar electronics market that grew out of the broken grid was almost entirely Chinese from the start. Luminous, Su-Kam and Mercury inverters (assembled in India from Chinese cells); Felicity, Ritar and Trojan-cloned lithium and gel batteries; Jinko, JA Solar and Canadian Solar PV panels routed through Tianjin and Shenzhen exporters. By 2023 the estimated installed base of inverter systems in Lagos alone exceeded 1.4 million units, and the captive solar market — household and SME — exceeded 800 MW, larger than the actual transmitted output of several Nigerian states. Almost none of this hardware existed in 2000.
The IT and consumer-electronics layer at Computer Village (Ikeja) followed the same arc. Desktops and monitors moved from Dell, HP and Compaq imports (1998–2008) to a mix of refurbished Western enterprise stock and white-label Chinese builds. The smartphone and feature-phone tier shifted to Tecno, Infinix and Itel (Phones · Act IV). Routers, set-top boxes, decoders, CCTV systems, point-of-sale terminals (the Moniepoint / OPay / PalmPay agent network runs almost entirely on Chinese-made POS hardware) — every layer of the digital economy that grew between 2010 and 2024 was built on Shenzhen supply chains.
What is striking, set against the Sanyo/National era of Act I, is that the Chinese wave came with no local assembly footprint at all. There is no Hisense plant in Ikeja, no TCL plant in Aba. The 22,000 Nigerian electronics-assembly jobs of 1979 were not replaced; the value-add that stayed in Nigeria collapsed to the importer margin, the haulage margin and the retail margin. The full manufacturing margin — the part that builds an industrial middle class — was earned by workers in Qingdao and Shenzhen. The Nigerian consumer got cheaper, better goods. The Nigerian economy got a deeper trade deficit and a thinner industrial base. The relationship is symmetrical to the cars story (Acts IV–V) and is part of the same answer to the question posed by the wealth story.
Figure 1
Nigerian consumer-electronics market share, 1972–2024 (% by units sold)
Three waves: Japanese assembly, Korean retail dominance, then a Chinese flood out of Alaba and Computer Village. Local assembly never rose above one fifth.