In the short span of four years, cell phone company Xiaomi (Chinese for “small rice”), has built its China-based brand to compete with big names like Apple, Samsung and Lenovo. Last year’s numbers make it clear that Xiaomi is on the rise; in 2013, Apple sold over 23 million smartphones in China, while Xiaomi sold over 18 million. In the first quarter of 2014, Xiomi has sold 10.4 million smartphones to Apple’s 9.4 million.
CEO, Lei Jun, has cut out the middle man by selling phones entirely online. Additionally, he hasn’t spent a dime on television advertising. He’s used this breathing room in Xiamo’s budget to drive phone prices down. Xiaomi has a powerful buzz on the biggest social media platforms in China, Weibo and WeChat. Xiaomi is already the third biggest handset maker in China, behind Huawei and Lenovo, and the sixth biggest handset maker in the world.
Lei Jun was very popular and successful before Xiaomi. Jun worked with Kingsoft, an office software company. Jun was widely known as the hardest worker at Kingsoft, so when he was named CEO, after only five years, it wasn’t at all a surprise. Kingsoft struggled early on, so Jun steered the company towards video games and security software. Jun took Kingsoft public in 2007 and raised $99M on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Two months later, Jun resigned from the company to forge out on his own. He started a personal venture capital fund that was largely successful, and he was financially set at that point, but it was when he gained support for a startup that things took off.
Jun created the MIUI operating system in 2010, and a year later he announced Xiaomai’s launch. The company has sold several batches, with each batch containing 100,000 phones, of the Mi1 model. Jun ended up selling 7 million Mi1 phones and 15 million Mi2 phones the following year. Some say that Jun will have to adapt to other countries’ tendencies, the largest being that customers worldwide are used to buying there smartphones in stores. Xiaomi’s list of targeted markets includes Mexico and Brazil.
Photo: Xiaomi
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