According to the latest report from China, Xiaomi is still the number one smartphone manufacturer in the country, as far as market share goes at least. The company trumped both Huawei and LeEco back in April, but when you look at global market share, Xiaomi can’t even come close to Huawei. Now, we’ve been talking about Xiaomi’s expansion to Europe and the US for a long time now, but that still didn’t happen. There are a number of obstacles for Xiaomi in order to do that, and it seems like the company is still not ready to do that. Xiaomi did, however, expand to some other areas outside of China, like Brazil for example. This China-based smartphone manufacturer has released their Redmi 2 smartphone in Brazil back in June last year, but it seems like things aren’t going all that well for the company.
Xiaomi expected that the business will take off in Brazil, they’ve even opened up their South America headquarters in the country, and everything seemed ready to go. Well, not quite, not even a year after the Redmi 2 launched in Brazil, Xiaomi has recalled its handset team from Brazil, at least according to the latest report. According to a report from Digitimes, Xiaomi is having issues promoting their devices in Brazil, and has no plans to introduce new models in the future, at least not in the near future. Xiaomi’s Brazil team has returned to China due to this, and the source even shared reasons why Xiaomi is having such issues. Brazil has a complicated tax system, and that, in addition to high logistics costs and low popularity of Xiaomi’s devices, resulted in canceled Brazil operations for the company. This report was actually based on Hugo Barra’s interview with the China-based 21st Century Business Herald, says the source.
In addition to all this, Hugo Barra also mentioned that the company will do their best in order to modify its local production policy in Brazil, in hope they’ll be able to cope with Brazil’s manufacturing policies which are constantly changing. If the company fails to do that, they’ll have to import devices to Brazil, and not manufacture them in the country. As a side note, Foxconn has been manufacturing devices for Xiaomi in Brazil until now. That is more or less it, if any additional info surfaces, we’ll let you know.