Xiaomi is, next to Huawei, the largest smartphone manufacturer in China at the moment. The two companies have been trading places at the top of that list for quite some time now. Xiaomi has shipped 61 million devices in 2014, and the company has set a goal to ship 80 to 100 million handsets this year, but it is possible they won’t be able to achieve that. The company has managed to sell 34.7 million units in the first half of the year, and it is still possible they’ll hit that 80 million number, though somewhat unlikely. The Xiaomi Mi 5 would certainly boost Xiaomi’s sales at the end of the year, but they still haven’t released their new flagship. That handset will be announced next year, so it won’t be able to boost Xiaomi’s sales even further. Xiaomi did, however, release the Redmi Note 3 and MI Pad 2 recently, so there’s still a chance.
Anyhow, it seems like Xiaomi underestimated the competition a bit. Some of the China-based companies started copying Xiaomi’s business model, and Huawei has been an enormous success this year, not only in China, but globally as well. That being said, Xiaomi’s CEO doesn’t seem all that worried about it. He said that it was to be expected considering smartphone sales are declining in China. The company has started selling devices in Brazil this year, and is growing really fast in India, not to mention that we’re expecting them to arrive to the US in 2016 as well. Now, it remains to be seen how many devices will Xiaomi sell before the end of the year, but even if they don’t meet their forecast, 2015 can still be considered a successful year for this company, that’s for sure.
Xiaomi will have a far harder time penetrating other markets which are completely different than the one in China, like the U.S. smartphone market, for example. It will be interesting to see if Xiaomi will stick to their flash sales and social media model, or will they adapt to the U.S. market and start doing business as other companies do, like Samsung, LG, Motorola, Huawei, etc. We’ll see what happens, but 2016 will surely be an interesting year for this Chinese smartphone manufacturer.