Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi – now valued at US$45 billion – sold 61.12 million smartphones in 2014, representing a 227% increase on 2013, according to an internal email from Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun. He also revealed that the company’s after-tax income from smartphone sales had soared 135% year-on-year to RMB74.3 billion (around US$11.98 billion) in the past year.
To some extent, Xiaomi’s smartphone shipment growth has overshadowed its sales figures, which indicate a decline in the average price per unit. This might be why the company released its sales figures first, rather than the common to announce after-tax results. The decline also suggests that the company’s budget smartphones, such as RedMi and Mi 3, have likely recorded more shipments than higher-priced models like the Mi4.
As China’s smart device battlefield becoming more competitive, Lei noted that 2015 Xiaomi will:
- Strengthen strategic ecosystem planning. Xiaomi will continue its 100-hardware-companies strategyover the year to create a more holistic ecosystem. It has invested in more than 20 smart hardware companies to date and has partnered with appliance giant Midea.
- Go global. Xiaomi is planning to expand overseas markets, having already entering to seven other countries and regions beyond China. Remarkable progress though that is, however, the company failed to reach its goal of expansion to ten countries as planned in April last year. Despite its setbacks in India, Xiaomi has sold over 1 million smartphones there in just five months, the company disclosed.
The year 2014 witnessed the swift development of Chinese smartphone manufacturers. Xiaomi’s major competitor Huawei announced it had shipped over 75 million smartphones last year. OnePlus expects to have shipped 1 million units in 2014 and Smartisan claimed to have sold out 122,063 sets as of early December.
At the same time, Xiaomi today also launched the long-rumored RedMi 2, the second generation of Xiaomi’s RedMi smartphone brand.Running on the MIUI 6 OS, Red Mi2 is powered by a 64-bit quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor clocked at 1.2GHz. It is 9.4mm thick and 133 gramsin weight. With a 4.7-inch IPS screen that has 1280*720p resolution, RedMi2 supports dual-card and dual-standby mode for both TDD and FDD networks and has 1GB of RAM and up to 32GB of internal storage. The camera is 2megapixel on the front and 8megapixel on the rear.
The device is offered in five candy colors (white, pink, yellow, green and black) and opens for pre-order on the company’s site and the latest version of Tencent’s Mobile QQ for RMB 699 (around US$112). Xiaomi is also planning to release another flagship product on January 15th.
Editing by Mike Cormack (@bucketoftongues)
