Chinese technology company Xiaomi held one of its famous “Mi Fan Festivals” on Wednesday 8th to commemorate its 5th birthday, and managed to sell no less than 2m smartphones during the 12 hour event. While this is rather smaller than the 10m iPhone 6s that Apple sold during its launch weekend, this was a shorter period of time, for an existing product, and only in one country.
Xiaomi is clearly hot in China, and is often held up as the “Apple of China”, due to its fanatical fan base, and charismatic leader Lei Jun, who models both his dress and his presentation style on that of Steve Jobs. This approach has taken Xiaomi to the number one position in the Chinese smartphone market, but has limited the company’s ambitions internationally, with rollouts to date only into a few other Asian countries - the US is not rumoured to be a target for a few years, and European plans are no more clear.
This explosive success is impressive, but is generally seen as of greater concern to Samsung, whose Android-based products have significantly less differential than Apple’s products. Indeed it is Samsung that was toppled from top slot for smartphones in China by Xiaomi in 2014.
