Off-grid solar company Sun King is expanding deeper into Kenya’s consumer technology market, locally assembling smartphones and using its established pay-as-you-go financing model to make the devices accessible through small daily payments.
The expansion builds on the company’s first large-scale African manufacturing facility in Kenya, which opened in October 2025 with capacity to produce up to 700,000 units annually. The facility was established to manufacture products including smartphones and televisions closer to Sun King’s African customers.
Brandspur Brand News reports that Sun King is now positioning its locally assembled EZ smartphone range against established players in Kenya’s device-financing market, including M-KOPA and Watu. The company first introduced its branded EZ 1 smartphone in February before expanding the range with the EZ 3 and EZ 3 Pro.
The EZ 3 is available with a KSh2,299 initial deposit followed by payments starting at KSh55 per day. The EZ 3 Pro starts with a KSh3,099 deposit and daily payments from KSh65, according to Sun King’s current Kenya offering.
The financing strategy extends a model Sun King has already deployed extensively in the off-grid solar industry. Rather than requiring customers to meet the full cost of products upfront, pay-as-you-go financing spreads payments into smaller instalments, potentially lowering the immediate financial barrier to acquiring a smartphone.
Sun King says it has sold one million smartphones globally since piloting the model and is currently selling about 50,000 phones monthly in Kenya. The company operates across 11 African countries and is also testing its smartphone offering in West Africa.
Its entry intensifies competition with M-KOPA, another company that grew from pay-as-you-go solar financing into smartphones and financial services. M-KOPA has developed a substantial local manufacturing operation in Nairobi and surpassed one million sales of its branded smartphones within the first year of launching the range.
For consumers who may struggle to raise the full purchase price of a smartphone at once, the growing competition is shifting attention towards financing terms, deposits and manageable repayment schedules.
Sun King’s smartphone push also represents a broader evolution of its business beyond solar energy. The company is increasingly using the financing and distribution infrastructure developed for off-grid energy products to provide other technologies, with smartphones becoming a major part of that strategy.
