A ROM maker company started out in the name of Xiaomi a handful years back. How much this young company has achieved in just 4 years is something truly remarkable. It now finds itself at the third position in the list of the top smartphone manufacturers worldwide. It is certainly something that would make all eight co-founders of the company more than just proud; the company not only rose through ranks at breakneck speed, but it also defied odds to start shaping up as a truly global company.
It isn’t often that you hear so much about a Chinese company. Most often, Chinese companies that are good at manufacturing something often sell out to larger brands to be their OEM, i.e., produce devices for other brand names. Xiaomi, however, didn’t fall prey to this usual practice. Not only did it make some quality phones, it also worked out a way to sell the devices in a way so that demand is, at all times, higher than supply. Xiaomi finally started looking out of the Chinese sub-continent earlier this year to foray into markets such as India, Singapore and Malaysia. And boy, Xiaomi doesn’t only survive in those markets, but it thrives. Take for example India; the company has been selling more than 50,000 units of its popular Redmi 1S smartphone every week consistently for the past two months.
Earlier this year, Xiaomi even ousted Samsung and Apple to be the #1 maker by volume in its home country of China. Considering the rate at which it is growing, #3 worldwide is no surprise; but if you take into account the company’s background and the way it has operated, it certainly makes for quite a success story. However, Xiaomi still is better at its home games than away ones; according to sources, the 14.6 million out of the 15.1 million smartphones it sold this year were in the Chinese market.
Ongoing price wars between international and Chinese makers have resulted in some seriously VFM smartphones being churned out; the One from startup OnePlus, and the Xiaomi Mi 4 are only a couple such examples. We’re hoping to see a lot more action from Xiaomi not only in South Asia, but also in Europe (where a lot of its devices inevitably end up thanks to resellers) and the US. Xiaomi does have a couple of things to take care before eyeing western markets though; the most important of which is the security issues it has been facing, and secondly, its supply chains which are often found lacking.