Xiaomi Partners With mface, Stepping Into Southeast Asia

Even when Tencent’s WeChat crossed an astounding 300 million user mark, Xiaomi still couldn’t let go of its almost similar offering Miliao which claimed about 23 million users. The popular Chinese smartphone vendor recently announced a partnership with mobile SNS service mface in which the latter would be taking care of marketing Miliao into Southeast Asia markets.

It is said that Miliao actually has already attracted some users outside China.

Mface defined itself as a “brand new Social Networking Service (SNS) features light-blogging for both personal and corporate use”. Its parent company, MBI Group is a company “involved in the technology industry, clothing, electronics, agriculture and retail chain stores”. There isn’t too much information available about how the service fares in Asia markets. What we do know is that the Malaysian startup was founded more than 1 year ago and its website mface.me ranked 61,151 (keep in mind it’s a mobile service though) on Alexa while Xiaomi.com came in 794.

In this partnership, Xiaomi will be in charge of developing customized version for Asian markets while mface is responsible for distributing them, presumably through its web/mobile presences in different Asian countries. Benny Kau, Executive Director of mface said that the light-blogging tool would promote Miliao service in Japan, Malaysia, Korea and Indonesia with the aim of hitting 5million users within a year.