Xiaomi is definitely one of the biggest surprises of 2014, the company’s growth-rate is staggering. This company is not even 5 years old and it is already the third biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and first in China, which is quite an achievement, no matter which way you look at it. The company was really active in January and has released a bunch of new products, and they’re planning all sorts of new devices for the rest of this year and will announce their expansion plans this month. We’re not here to talk about that though, but something else, let’s get to it.
BGR India recently held an event where they interviewed Xiaomi’s VP of International, Hugo Barra, a man who you probably know because he used to work for Google and announce all sort of Google products. Anyhow, he was asked “how do you pronounce Xiaomi?”, which is something that I bet most people still don’t know. In case you’d like to find that out for yourself, we’ve embedded a video down below which shows Hugo Barra’s answer to this question. The correct way of pronouncing the company’s name is “Shao-Mi”, though you need to watch the video in order to hear the correct tone. Xiaomi, as some of you might know, means “little rice” in Chinese.
Well, “little rice” is growing into a really huge company. This China-based smartphone manufacturer managed to raise over a billion dollars in funding quite recently and is planning to invest that in order to expand business to other parts of the world. India, Latin America, South-East Asia and Russia have all been mentioned in the last couple of months, and we’re eagerly awaiting Xiaomi to announce their plans. Recent reports have been claiming that Xiaomi will open up shop in India in Q2 or Q3 2015, in other words, they will start selling their devices in that Asian country via the official website, which probably means their deal with Flipkart will seize to exist or something. These are just rumors at this point, we’re waiting for the company to go on record and reveal their plans, so stay tuned.