Xiaomi's smartphone taps into the US market

Xiaomi Corp, the world's third-largest smartphone manufacturer, will launch its new smartphone in Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that falls in January 2015 in Las Vegas, the first-ever appearance of the fast-growing Chinese IT company in the US market.

According to the Economic Daily News in China, Xiaomi might launch its newest flagship smartphone Mi5 their newest flagship that has high-end specifications but with a low-end price, like most of the smartphones that have come out of China.

It was reported that the new smartphone will may pack a Quad 5.7-inch HD display, a powerful Qualcomm chipset as well as fingerprint scanning tech by default.

According to a report from International Data Corporation (IDC), Xiaomi's smartphone shipment in the third quarter 2014 ranked the third after Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Lei Jun, Xiaomi's founder and CEO, dubbed as "China's Steve Jobs", said the company might become the world's largest smartphone maker in the next five to ten years during a forum of World Internet Conference held in November in China.

Xiaomi stepped into global market by entering 10 new markets India, Brazil and Russia this year. It also set a goal of increasing sales to 100 million phones in 2015, according to an April 23 report from Bloomberg News.

The company recently has been making a series of aggressive investments for entering the global and US market. Analysts point out that Lei has started to make Xiaomi's own ecosystem to challenge Apple.

On Dec 1, the company announced its participation in the $40 million fundraising for Misfit, a Silicon Valley-based start-up. It is the first time that Xiaomi has taken a stake in a US mobile-device maker.

Misfit, which claims to make the biggest-selling activity and sleep tracker in China, said on Tuesday it had raised new financing from Xiaomi, e-commerce company JD.com Inc., and venture-capital firms GGV Capital and Shunwei, a VC firm set up by Xiaomi.

Xiaomi Corp, and Kingsoft Corp., announced on Dec 4 that the two companies will invest $1 billion for cloud services in next three to five years.

Lei, co-founder of both companies, revealed details of the first-round $222 million investment in the NASDAQ-listed 21Vianet Group Inc., the largest carrier-neutral Internet data center service provider in China. Temasek Holdings of Singapore also agreed to inject $74 million into 21Vianet.

"Cloud service will become one of the prime costs of IT companies in the future," said Lei on Dec 3.

"For instance, at the current data upload speed, Xiaomi after next year will have to pay an annual $488 million fee for the data storage, most of which are the pictures and videos from users of Xiaomi's smartphones and other mobile technology products," said Lei.

"Sixty-eight million Xiaomi users are uploading 90 million pictures and 2 million videos every day," said Lei.

On Nov 19, Xiaomi also made a $294 million investment in online video provider iQiyi, a unit of search giant Baidu Inc.

wangru@chinadaily.com.cn