After years of sticking to online campaigns and flash sales, Xiaomi decided to uplift their brand by building its own signature outlets. Now, Xiaomi’s move of bringing its smartphones into brick-and-mortar stores has paid off after the top Chinese smartphone manufacturer announced a 70% increase in sales from the previous quarter.
Xiaomi Highlights this year
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun confirmed that they have broken the record and achieved a huge breakthrough by managing to ship 23.16 million smartphones in this year’s second quarter. In addition, the Chinese tech giant head announced that Xiaomi brand is now the second biggest smartphone brand in overall Indian smartphone market, wherein their revenue growth increased to 328 percent year-on-year.
It is expected that this success will continue as the company expands its full operation in Russia, bringing to the country its Mi Note 2, Mi Mix and Redmi 4X flagships.
Xiaomi’s successful growth is said to be partly due to the company’s investments in R&D, Surge S1 launch, Xiaomi Mi 6 launch, Xiaomi Mi Max 2 launch and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 launch, which has become the highest selling smartphone line in the Indian market.
Meanwhile, aside from the announcement of the successful shipment growth this year, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun also announced their new target for 2018 – to ship 100 million smartphones. The same goal was set a few years ago, but the company fell short as they were only able to ship out 70 million phones.
Hopefully, the ambitious 100 million target for 2018 will turn out well than the last time.
Xiaomi’s other investments
Since Xiaomi is fueling its ambition to take on all current top tech giant in the smartphone market, the company signed a deal with another popular name in the tech industry to boost its patent portfolio. According to CNet, Xiaomi just recently signed an agreement with #Nokia.
Just like Xiaomi’s focus, Nokia is said to be working together with the Chinese tech giant to also dominate the smartphone market again.
The agreement between both companies deals with “cross licensing of cellular patents” and the chance to work together in areas like virtual reality, Internet of Things, AI development and Nokia’s FP4 network processor, just to name a few.
According to Nokia’s CEO Rajeev Suri, he is very pleased to have reached an agreement with Xiaomi, while Xiaomi’s CEO said that their partnership with Nokia will help them create and deliver more outstanding products and services worldwide.
Xiaomi 2017 expected launches
Other than Nokia partnership, this year will strengthen Xiaomi’s brand as it is scheduled to release a new Android flagship next week and a new Nougat-based UI in August.
The new Android smartphone was teased by Xiaomi via Weibo. The 13-second teaser lacks important details though this may be the much-anticipated Mi 6 Plus, which was initially rumored to be released in April. According to the teaser, the upcoming flagship will sport Snapdragon 8XX-series SoC, 4000 mAh battery capacity with fast charging capability, 22MP camera and USB Type-c port.
Though not all important specs have been teased, the promotional video ended with a July 11 date, suggesting that this will be the unveiling date of Xiaomi’s flagship device.
Meanwhile, Xiaomi also gave a glimpse of its new Nougat-based UI – MIUI 9. Although the new UI will be based on Android 7.0 or 7.1 (depending on eligible devices), reports suggest that the latest UI will also borrow some features from Android 8 Android O. The new MIUI 9 is expected to roll out on Aug. 16.
