Xiaomi Corp (小米), one of China’s hottest companies, is bringing its blend of cheap, yet fashionable technology and crowd-pleasing antics to the US.
Although its smartphones will not be available in the US any time soon, Xiaomi on Thursday unveiled plans to test the US market by selling inexpensive headphones and other accessories online. It plans to hew to the Internet-driven, customer-friendly model that has helped turn the company into a major player in mobile computing just five years after its founding.
Xiaomi has made a name in China by selling sleek gadgets at relatively low prices, using online sales and social media to keep marketing and distribution costs low. Some analysts have hailed the company as the Chinese equivalent of Apple Inc, in part because of its intensely loyal fans.
There are some significant differences between the two companies’ approaches, though. While Apple tends to keep its future product plans secret, Xiaomi has invited customers to nosh on popcorn at company parties, chat on Xiaomi’s online forums and review or make suggestions for new features, which Xiaomi frequently builds into its weekly software updates.
“We don’t have customers or users. They prefer to be addressed [as] fans,” said Hugo Barra, who defected from his job overseeing Google Inc’s Android products in 2013 to help plot Xiaomi’s expansion outside of China.
Barra was joined on Thursday by Xiaomi cofounder and president Lin Bin (林斌) at the company’s first major press event in the US.
In an interview, Barra described the US Web site as “an experimental launch” that is calculated to help the company raise awareness in the US, which in turn would help its profile in other countries.
He said the company is also hoping to get the kind of feedback and ideas from US consumers that the company gathers in China.
Xiaomi has emerged as a mobile-computing sensation with a line of smartphones sold in China, India and six other countries where much of the population still lacks Internet access. The company plans to expand into Brazil later this year.
Its phones offer a smattering of the sleek technology featured in fancier devices made by the likes of Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, but they sell at much lower prices, ranging from about US$95 to US$280. In comparison, an iPhone 6 starts at US$650 without subsidies for signing a two-year contract.
A Xiaomi phone “may not be the best product out there, but a product with the best combination: a very affordable price and good quality,” Beijing-based Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business corporate strategy expert Teng Bingsheng (滕斌聖) said.
While the iPhone still dominates the smaller luxury segment of China’s market, Xiaomi’s devices are being snapped up by the masses almost as quickly as the company starts accepting online orders. Xiaomi sold about 61 million phones last year, more than tripling its 2013 volume, Lin said.
That established Xiaomi as China’s top seller of smartphones with a 15 percent market share to edge out Samsung at 14 percent, according to research firm HIS Inc.
However, another research firm, Canalys, estimated that Apple sold more phones in China than either of those companies in the fourth quarter of last year, when Apple’s new iPhone 6 models came out.
By concentrating on online sales of phones and accessories, Lin said, the company has built the third-largest e-commerce site in China.
Besides phones, Xiaomi has an electronics lineup that ranges from a 49-inch flat-panel TV for US$550 to a fitness band for about US$13. The company has also sold about 2 million stuffed bunnies that serve as Xiaomi’s mascot.
Xiaomi is just dipping its toes in the US market by selling accessories for now, including headphones for about US$80.
Barra said it takes “an incredible amount of work” to bring more technologically complicated products, such as a smartphone, to a new market.
He did not say when that might happen.
Executives acknowledged the company would face big hurdles in the US, where most consumers buy smartphones from wireless carriers at subsidized prices. That could make Xiaomi’s low-margin business model less effective.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS