It can be said that one of the biggest motivators of innovation is competition. Apple wanted to build a better computer than Microsoft, so they created the Mac. Facebook felt that the social scene was stale, so they went head-to-head against MySpace and came out with the world’s largest social network. Great products have come from these rivalries and it appears that Xiaomi an LeTV are going to be the next story that people recant, as they have both gone on the offense in an attempt to destroy the other.
Xiaomi was founded in 2010 and in five short years, the have grown to be the third largest distributor of smartphones in the world today beating better-known rivals, Lenovo and LG. So what makes them such a potent force? Their unorthodox business model of selling their products almost at cost-of-production. This allows them to sell their products at a much lower price than their competitors without having to use inferior materials on their devices. Coupled with their lack of physical stores, as they sell all their products online, it is easy to see why they became such a large company in just a few short years.
LeTV on the other hand specializes in online media, with only a very small footprint in the smartphone arena. They came to be in 2004 by providing entertainment media to thousands of Chinese users. They are not as big as Xiaomi, even though they have be around longer, but they also cater to a different kind of consumer. They do create more than content though, as they have some great smart TVs on the market.
So what makes these two companies want to go against one another and compete for users? The small and only fact that they have both started to encroach on each others territories, Xiaomi by creating smart TVs and LeTV with smartphones. Normally rivalries like these are nothing new and tend to go unnoticed by most consumers. What makes this rivalry unique is that the CEO’s of both companies have gone and publicly denounced the other and Business Insider picked up the story. They created a whole article on the rivalry, something that does not normally occur, due to the fact that these companies are so similar yet so different at the same time. Only time will tell which company comes out on top but great products are sure to come out, whoever the victor is.