So you know when most companies they open a new store they kind of treat it like a massive deal, well Xiaomi in a single day opened not one not two but a thousand stores crazy company and seeing how fast they're expanding, It's time we address them.So these are things about Xiaomi from pretty cool to just ridiculous.
- So the name Xiaomi you might think that given what they sell it's got something to do with gadgets, but it actually translates to little rice which refers to a Buddhist concept, all about starting with very little and working your way up to the top and even their logo is a little bit more than it seems, there's the obvious fact that it says me which is like a shorthand of Xiaomi but it also legitimately stands for both mobile internet and there's another layer flip this logo over and MI becomes the Chinese symbol for heart.
- If had to define Xiaomi by just one characteristic, it would be community focused. You know Oneplus has this whole attitude of treating their customers like fans, well I think there's a pretty good chance that they got this from Xiaomi like a company who hosts quiz tournaments with their most loyal followers, who host meetups everywhere from Nepal to the united states, who invited fans to the office for Christmas in Spain, a company who went out and cleaned up after flooding in Thailand alongside their MI family. For the most part they know how to connect with people and there's probably no better example of this than the MI fan festival it's an online event where Xiaomi basically launches a few new products, they slap discounts across their existing products and they even create games for people to win things. In the last festival they did and just the Chinese branch of it, they managed to get 98 million people participated.
- Xiaomi's main hurdle right now, they're very china focused they have separate china only launch events like a good month before everyone else gets their phones. Many of their products they never even release in other countries and while it almost looks like Xiaomi has their own religion in china, but they've really struggled to cultivate that kind of fandom outside. For example just take Lei Jun who's the chairman of Xiaomi, he has around 60 000 followers on twitter the global platform at the same time, he has on 23 million the china only Weibo , but this is changing Xiaomi has taken a lot of steps recently to to try and make itself a worldwide entity like, in 2013 they brought in Hugo Barrow a high-profile google employee to become vice president of Xiaomi which it doesn't take a genius is also in part to just give them this western friendly image.
- In 2017 Xiaomi signed a collaboration deal with Nokia such that both companies can use each other's patents and there's actually more to this whole Nokia overlap you see Xiaomi's cameras have been famously tailored to Asian consumers like the heavy beautification the skin smoothing the type of filters and even the ability to change the shape of your face these are things that the Asian market really appreciates but the western market doesn't so much so to try and cater for international tastes Xiaomi's actually set up a camera lab in Finland in the exact same city where Nokia's camera lab was presumably to hire employees who know what they're doing.
- Xiaomi's always had a a bit of a pronunciation problem because I mean in most western languages we don't see words like this .Hugo Barrow actually helped with this pronunciation problem so the way he described it to people was, if you want to say Xiaomi then try and say 'show me' .
- So with this more global mindset and with this whole hiring of more international employees within just 10 years Xiaomi's gone from a band of eight guys in a room in china to now selling devices in 90 different countries. They've actually knocked off Apple to become the second biggest in Spain and in Ukraine they're number one. Xiaomi is just generally killing it in Eastern Europe because, it's just a market where people are less attached to Samsung and apple and much more just in pursuit of value and even though Xiaomi hasn't broken into the USA yet there is promise like Steve Wozniak himself co-founder of Apple is actually a bit of a Xiaomi fan and he himself publicly said that, Xiaomi products are good enough to break the american market
- When xiaomi first looked at India as a potential market it really did seem like a mission impossible like for starters nobody there had heard of them and there's also the fact that Xiaomi's entire business model at the time was based on online sales but this market wasn't they did it, though and within just six years they were not just trading blows with Samsung for the absolute top position but they've also managed to dethrone just about every single local brand they provided better value rock bottom prices flash sales Xiaomi even started manufacturing in India to save on shipping costs.
- Most interesting thing is Xiaomi's attitude to profit you know how there's this common idea towards things you buy in a store that oh it's great but they probably made this for a fraction of the price, well that doesn't really work in the android phone market especially for Xiaomi who apparently only takes away about two dollars of profit per device sold. This still becomes a fairly substantial figure given the number of devices they sell, but the way that Xiaomi really gets its profits up is through software like how on more budget devices they bundle in adverts which you can turn off, but just given the fact that they're on by default and the fact that they're shown literally every time you install an app or use a first party tool.
- Xiaomi actually invests a large sum in getting talented developers on board to make them and they even pay these developers before they've even done anything, just so that they don't have to worry about making money and they can focus on being creative.
- When Xiaomi started in 2010 they were an internet and software company they saw how android phones at the time lacked customization and looked kind of boring so their first product was actually not a phone but just a piece of software it was MIUI and it actually took Xiaomi a whole extra year after starting for them to come out with a phone that ran it do.
- The most surprising thing though about Xiaomi success it's the fact that it's not just been an incredibly short time frame but they've also managed to do this with just 20 000 full-time employees that might sound like a lot but, Huawei has almost 200 000 and Xiaomi's main competitor right now Samsung almost 300 000 and so the only way that this growth has been possible is because Xiaomi doesn't waste time they specifically say on their website how they're against never-ending meetings and lengthy processes and there's also the ongoing debate as to whether they save time by also borrowing ideas. For example how their stores look like carbon copies of Apple stores the same color scheme, the same product spacing to make each thing seem important even how they decorate their walls but the thing that i think has caused even more of a stir is the products themselves some of Xiaomi's past products look so much like the Apple counterparts .
- They have phones yes but also everything from a nose hair trimmer to an electric unicycle to a mattress to a robot vacuum cleaner which is funnily enough the one that i use and Xiaomi is not afraid to test the limits they made the mix alpha with its wrap-around display they made a triple folding phone even though it never released they made a transparent TV.
- Big tech companies have their headquarters likeApple's colossal glass headquarters or Huawei's sprawling European city-like workplace but it's actually really hard to find almost anything about Xiaomi's headquarters, they call it the Technology Park and it does look fascinating there are slides to go downstairs there are people carting around on Xiaomi built products and this is also where their labs are they have more than 90 rooms here each built to make sure that their smartphones are all calibrated right that the cameras look good, that the audio sounds correct, they've even got a room here that can simulate every weather condition to make sure that the screens remain pleasant to look at in them, but probably the coolest part of this headquarters is that Xiaomi has a fake home here and the idea is that this is the kind of home that they are targeting their MI devices at and so by having one here in their complex it means they cannot just use it to test things they're building to make sure they work in that home environment.
- Xiaomi's going global Steve Wozniak himself recommended them they're kind of like apple but cheaper they don't have a presence in the united states.
- Xiaomi has an official dog she was actually a stray who just so happened to end up outside their engineering headquarters as it was being built so they took her in. She was apparently in pretty bad shape so they got her treated they cleaned her up and then actually gave her a company badge until one of the employees decided to just look after her full-time.
- Xiaomi try and improve their appearance globally by shortened their website url from xiaomi.com to mi.com for this simple domain name swap Xiaomi paid 3.6 million us dollars.
