Lin Bin, co-founder and president of Xiaomi, announced with a Weibo post that Hugo Barra, vice president of product management for Android at Google, was joining Xiaomi as vice president of Xiaomi Global.
Barra will take charge of Xiaomi’s international expansion and cooperation with Google’s Android, reads Lin’s post. Barra will show up on September 5 when Xiaomi’s annual product launch event will take place.
The news was first reported by AllthingsD. Google later confirmed that Barra had left the company.
Update: Hugo Barra also confirmed it on Google+.
In the picture above, Hugo Barra was introducing Nexus 7 tablet at the recent launch event. He joined Google’s mobile division in 2008 and started working on Android in 2010.
Three years into existence, Android phone company Xiaomi has become one of the most known smartphone brands in China. As of the first half of 2013, Xiaomi had shipped 14 million phones and had a combined 20 million users of MIUI, the customized Android ROM developed by the company. More recently it announced the fourth round of financing at a valuation of $10 billion. Lei Jun, its co-founder and CEO, expected that Xiaomi’s total annual revenues from smartphones, software, content and advertising would reach 100 billion yuan in a couple of years.
image credit: allthingsd.com
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