Not long ago, Tsoi Chun Bun made potato chips. Now he designs and sells millions of mobile phones a year.

He is one of hundreds of young entrepreneurs seeking overnight fortunes in Shenzhen Inc. — the Wild West of the mobile-phone industry. Phones made and designed by these Chinese vendors will account for about a third of the 1.1 billion cell phones that will be sold around the world this year.

Three decades ago, Shenzhen was China’s first city to experience market-oriented economic reform, unleashing anything-goes capitalism that has spread throughout the nominally capitalist country. And while China’s mobile-phone industry has spread beyond Shenzhen, the southern region remains a center of the mobile-phone ecosystem that inspires dreams of instant success.

“It is China’s version of the Gold Rush,” said Shanghai-based Ken Qing Wang, general manager of the China operations of Silicon Valley-based Telegent Systems, which supplies analog TV chips to the mobile-phone industry. “A lot of wealth has been generated.”

Tsoi, who at 33 is already wealthy and founder of Chinaking International Development, has his eyes set on even loftier heights. “There are lots of billionaires in their twenties here,” he said. Waving a pink cell phone, Tsoi proclaimed he intends to join the billionaires club after a successful initial public offering “in a couple of months.”

Such gunslinger hubris is what goes for street talk in Shenzhen, which supplies cell phones primarily for the developing world but also covets the developed world. Whether mobile-phone makers like Tsoi can ever compete with such innovative thoroughbreds as Apple and Research In Motion is questionable. But companies like Chinaking have shown they can make money in developing nations. For now, they are happy to focus on the next billion mobile phone consumers — the world’s urban poor and rural residents who often are out of the reach of giant international brands. Those lowly markets, though, are expected to represent 60 percent of global mobile-phone sales by 2013, according to researcher Informa Telecoms & Media.

By John Boudreau. Read the entire article.