" The Beijing-based company has come out of nowhere this year to become the biggest threat to Apple, Samsung and other smartphone makers."
" Xiaomi phones can’t touch the iPhone or the Galaxy in terms of quality (yet), but the company beats them handily on price "
" The company’s private valuation is already estimated to have surpassed $10 billion — double the valuation of BlackBerry and half that of Sony. "
" Xiaomi sold 7 million handsets last year and just as many in the first half of this year, putting it on track to sell 20 million in all of 2013. "
In these days and especially in the previous months the technology industry has been shaken by a new and disruptive product: Xiaomi.
Everybody knows that from the death of Steve Jobs, Apple hasn't been the same company that he used to conduct and spread around the world, maybe because his charismatic and challenging character has not been replaced by Tim Cook, or maybe ,in a worst scenario, Apple has lost her ability to create innovation in a not anymore " game-changer " mode.
Probably that is the reason why, in a industry so competitive like the hi-tech, Apple has lost lots of opportunity and tons of market shares in favour of Samsung, HTC, and in these days to Xiaomi.
" Have you heard of Xiaomi yet? If you haven’t, you probably will pretty soon. If you have, you know the Beijing-based company has come out of nowhere this year to become the biggest threat to Apple, Samsung and other smartphone makers. "
The Time is right, Xiaomi will become for sure the real threat to Apple and Samsung, because it's able to match high technologies ( but not at the same level of Apple and Samsung) with low prices and a network of salers very capillar, and that is the clue factor to be succesfull in China and, of course, in every part of the world.
Xiaomi has been founded in the 2010, and in circa 3 years of activity, now it is estimated of more than $10billion, that means more than two times of Blackberry and circa half of Sony!
Outside of China, Xiaomi began to gain notice in July, when research firm Canalys said that the company’s market share in China surpassed Apple for the first time in the second quarter. Apple’s share fell from 8% to 5% in a single quarter.
Those numbers are very appealing and if you add on that Xiaomi has recently hired Hugo Barra, who has been the head of product development at Google's Android division, is easy to understand what aims this firms has for its future.
And it doesn't finish here!
Infact, Xiaomi has an exclusive contract with China Mobile ( the state-owned telecom giant) as Samsung, that helps the firm to compete even better against Apple that can't count on this key factor asset.
Another main difference between Apple, as the Time reports, is that while the Cupertino, giant ran iTunes for years at little or no profit — using its music, movies and apps as a way to sell higher-margin devices — Xiaomi’s approach is similar to Amazon. Amazon sells its Kindle devices at or below cost to expand market share, using apps and content revenue to shore up slim margins.
In conclusion, the rise of Xiaomi has left the market wondering about how Apple will respond to a company thriving by using strategies very different from its own. In a research note, Sanford C. Bernstein called Xiaomi a “new disruptive force” that “particularly stands out to us as a potential game-changer.”
For its part, Xiaomi sounds a little more confident about its prospects against Apple. “They [Apple] don’t really care about what the users want. They imagine what the users want.”
The Great Wall is moving, and probably for Apple, too fast!
The Economist's interview to Tom Standage
The Economist's article here
The Time's article here
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