Xiaomi is, as most of you know, one of the largest China-based smartphone manufacturers at the moment. This company grew immensely in the last couple of years, they are well known for manufacturing affordable, and yet quality products which have managed to attract the attention of consumers all around the world, even though the availability of Xiaomi’s devices is still quite limited (region specific). People actually associate the word ‘Xiaomi’ to affordable smartphones, but it seems like that might not be the case moving forward, read on.
The company’s Vice President of International, Hugo Barra, shared some insight recently as to where Xiaomi is headed. He basically said that Xiaomi is going to focus on premium devices moving forward, so what exactly does that mean? Well, let’s see what Hugo Barra had to say, shall we. Hugo Barra shared his thoughts in Hong Kong recently, at Xiaomi’s Mi Home centre, at least according to the South China Morning Post. “When you look at… the prices of our products, they have been going up. Our customers are demanding premium products from us, so we are delivering higher quality with more premium components”. Now, the company had introduced a number of affordable devices thus far, and even their Mi 5 flagship is more affordable than its competition, the phone’s pricing starts from 1,999 Yuan ($300) in China, while the ‘Pro’ edition of that device comes in at 2,699 Yuan ($400). Well, based on Hugo Barra’s statement, the pricing of Xiaomi’s devices might rise in the future considering the company is going to put more focus on premium products, though that doesn’t mean they won’t be releasing very affordable devices as well.
A recent rumor said that that the Mi Note 2 might cost around $600, this is the company’s upcoming flagship phablet, and it is possible that the highest-end variant of this device is set to cost as much. This definitely falls in line with Hugo Barra’s statement, it seems like Xiaomi plans to be at the bleeding edge of technology moving forward. The company’s competition, and by that we mean other Chinese OEMs (mainly Huawei), has been releasing affordable devices as well, but they’ve also released some premium products which are not all that affordable. Let’s take Huawei as an example, the company had introduced two Huawei P9 devices as their flagship smartphones, while the Huawei Mate 8 phablet also deserves to be mentioned here, despite the fact it launched last year. It will be interesting to see what happens from this point on, but it seems like Xiaomi might increase prices for their premium devices in order to make them even better.