Xiaomi certainly has big plans for the future, the company has announced expansion plans for India, Latin America, South-East Asia and Russia. It seems like those plans will be somewhat delayed. This Chinese manufacturer still plans to expand to Brazil, Russia, Thailand, Mexico and Turkey in the next year, but a bit later than anticipated. Xiaomi wants to focus on India and Indonesia before they move to other markets. “We realized that it’s a smarter thing to do to scale back a bit and put a ton of effort in India and Indonesia before expanding further,”
said Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s Vice President of international. Xiaomi currently uses (mainly) Foxconn in order to produce devices, but considering the demand Xiaomi gets for its devices, the company will need to expand its production capability. According to Bloomberg, Xiaomi is also in talks with Foxconn about producing handsets in Brazil and India.
Xiaomi is one of the fastest growing tech companies as of late. This Chinese OEM was founded in 2010, in 2013 they sold 19 million devices and this year they will step over the 60 million mark. In 2015, the company plans to manufacture over 100 million devices, which is quite feat for the company and it will be interesting to see if they can pull it off. Expansion to other markets isn’t easy, China being Xiaomi’s main operating point, but this company might actually pull it off in the end, we’ll see. Xiaomi’s app store crossed 10 billion downloads and the company made it available internationally recently, which are great news of course. Xiaomi is still seeking $1.5 billion in funding and just to give you an example how many devices Xiaomi can sell, the company received $163 million during Single’s Day in China recently, which is China’s version of Black Friday, kind of, it’s the biggest shopping day in the world.
This Chinese manufacturer means business, we already knew that, but the question remains, can they expand without some serious hiccups on the way? There are many obstacles here, other markets are vastly different from those in Asia, so Xiaomi has to adapt, not only that, but there are possible patent lawsuits on the way. Either way, it will be interesting to see how things will develop in the coming time.