Chinese vendor debuts Alcatel phones at CTIA

The first Chinese phone in the U.S. oddly will have a French name. At CTIA Wireless in Orlando this week, Chinese consumer electronics maker TCL will unveil a new line of U.S. GSM handsets, the first from a mainland Chinese vendor, and all bearing the Alcatel logo.

TCL Communications Technology Holdings bought French vendor Alcatel's handset division in 2004 with permission to use the Alcatel brand for 10 years (as T&A Mobile Phones, though that name has been thankfully dropped for the U.S. launch). Although there is no relationship with Alcatel-Lucent anymore, TCL has managed to leverage the Alcatel brand from Asia to Latin America to Europe. Now it's coming to North America where the Alcatel name isn't exactly a consumer icon. That makes TCL's stated goal of becoming a vendor of stylish devices all the more difficult, considering the millions of dollars that handset vendors invest in marketing in the U.S.

But according to Seamus McAteer, chief product architect and senior analyst for M:Metrics, brand in the U.S. isn't everything.

“In the U.S., LG is ahead of Nokia in terms of market share,” McAteer said. “The reason is not because LG's brand is front in center. It's because of its carrier relationships.”

With the vast majority of phone sales being driven and subsidized by carriers, striking a deal with an operator is much more important than building the name recognition of a Motorola or Nokia, McAteer said. Companies can easily target the white-label business that has driven Huawei and ZTE's handset sales in Europe or can target entry-level users, which seems to be what TCL is doing.

TCL is going through a North American distributor Callatel and selling initially to Tier 2 carriers. And it isn't entirely coming up empty-handed brand-wise. It's licensed the rights to the Elle fashion brand, which it has used to market phones to the fashion-conscious in other parts of the world.