China's Xiaomi Gearing Up For US Debut (bloomberg.com) 42
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Xiaomi is preparing to enter the U.S. smartphone market "in the near future," employing the same online sales and social media marketing tactics that helped the six-year-old startup become China's largest privately funded startup. Xiaomi can no longer afford to ignore the world's largest smartphone arena by revenue, company vice president Hugo Barra said in an interview. Its international expansion is taking on new-found urgency as growth at home slows and rivals such as Huawei erode its market share. "The U.S. is a market that we definitely have in our sights," Barra said on Bloomberg Television. "We will lead with social media, with the channels that allow us to get in touch with the young generation that are enthusiastic about new technology. We are definitely going there." Barra, who oversees the Chinese company's international expansion, has signaled Xiaomi's U.S. debut before. But the smartphone vendor is now in a better position to launch an incursion onto Apple's turf. In June, the Beijing-based company announced the acquisition of nearly 1,500 technology patents from Microsoft -- a deal that may smooth potential legal tangles over intellectual property as it pushes abroad.
Subsidy == No Sales (Score:2, Insightful)
Like we saw with Solar panels, it's easy for China to subsidize products to cause irreparable harm to foreign manufacturers. I have no doubts that the current administration does not care, they only have to suffer the people's wrath for a few more months. The rest of us however should be demanding that the company has it's books wide open for review.
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This will be their biggest challenge - overcoming prejudice against Chinese products and companies. They will be labelled as cheap Chinese made crap (somehow putting "designed in California" on the box changes that) and accused of being a government front for backdoors and economy-weakening subsidies.
Maybe they should just double the price, seems to have worked for Samsung.
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Everything is made in China. If people didn't want Chinese crap, Walmart wouldn't still be in business.
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Everything is made in China. If people didn't want Chinese crap, Walmart wouldn't still be in business.
You can't judge all products made in a country alike. Not all products from America are as shoddy as "America" - heck, not even most beers are. For that matter, actual beer from Budweis (aka Budjovice) tastes nothing like it, but that is beyond the point.
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iPhones are manufactured in China, and so are plenty of Samsung's components. Xiaomi could well battle HTC and Huewei for a solid third place slot, and that slot really is up for grabs right now. "Chinese" tends to mean "flimsy", "poorly constructed", and/or "knockoff product" in context, but Xiaomi has had a few well-constructed handsets that indicate a potential for doing alright in the market. Honestly, what the bigger concern is for them is whether they'll be able to play the carrier game and not get sc
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"Designed in California, made in China" is parsecs different from "Designed and made in China". Shoddy quality, substandard procedures and poor quality control matters big time if you want to climb up with in the market chain
Ahh, but Xiaomi is "Exterior designed in California, rest done in China".
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Well, for Xiaomi, it's a bit deserved, since their MIUI, copied, err, "borrowed" heavily from iOS. It was a pretty thorough reskinning too.
They do make nice phones, but they cheapen them with the copying of loo
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Party Officer (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't fool yourself kids, these cheap Android phones all have backdoors to China.
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The only ideology alive in China is the love of money.
Re: Party Officer (Score:1)
At least they remove the backdoors to the US government...
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.. a simple change to Saomi would probably ..
Who would pick a name that sounds like 'Sue Me' ?
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But... (Score:2)
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It's a good question, but the phone is not the Xiaomi experience.The full Xiaomi experience is all about hyper-focused customer marketing. See this paper - "Fan-centric social media: The Xiaomi phenomenon in China" (PD: https://goo.gl/f7EZtS [goo.gl])
Abstract:
In this highly competitive century, social media offers both opportunities
and challenges. The concept of social media is top of mind for many entrepreneurs
today. Fans are assuming an increasingly active role in co-creating marketing content
with companies and th
Hopefully other products as well (Score:3)
They have an excellent range of clever products, like tablets, power banks, external storage, headphones, and other devices, conveniently at a good price. I hope they have a store presence here, waiting for that stuff to ship (and avoiding counterfeiters) is a pain.
Great products for the price (Score:5, Interesting)
After replacing my Samsung Galaxy S4 (flagship device, cost when new 550 euro) with a Xiaomi Mi4 (flagship device, cost when new 200 euro), I have never looked back. I tried the switched because there were a couple of annoyances with the Samsung, plus I actual made money from the switch (yes, people were buying a second hand S4 for more than a new Mi4!). Not only you get the top specs, same as every other flagship, including high quality screen, good battery (the Mi4 lasts about 20-25% more than my S4), but you also get some unique stuff that only the Xiaomi has. For example, without even using a PC, you can go to the Xiaomi website, download the latest ROM image, save it and either upgrade or rename it, reboot in service mode and have it clean-install (useful when ordering from cheap retailers that make up for the lower price by installing spyware/adware crap). Oh, and when you do something bad and break your installation, it is dual boot with a clean basic image installed on an extra partition! Even better, Xiaomi continuously updates all their phones, you can be running Android 6.0.1 (official) whether you have the latest flagship (Mi 5), or the previous flagship (Mi 4) or the flagship before that (Mi 3 from 2013) or their cheapest device from 2 years ago (Redmi 1S) etc...
And they have some other cool devices as well, but their phones have really done it for me, I'll be going with Xiaomi as long as they don't screw it up. Since you have to go through sometimes shady retailers sometimes currently, it will be great if they officially export to the US and other countries.
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This is not related to "non-brand" or discount brand phones with a generic Android slapped-on with some crap. Xiaomi is actually the Chinese high-end, and their OS called MIUI is actually a very well maintained project with a consistent UI (I'd say it borrows ideas from iOS and TouchWiz, in any case it is simple and familiar), continuous updates with the latest Android kernels and various useful extras. In fact, they build packages for hundreds of third party phones (including all the popular LG, Samsung, H
Typical Chinese (Score:2)
good artists copy; great artists steal (Score:3)
"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
-- Steve Jobs, 1996
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It doesn't mean to make a wholesale knock-off copy of something. That misses the point entirely. Everything is a remix: we all take elements from the thinks that came before us and improve on them to invent new things. We don't just try to copy an entire product from beginning to end. That doesn't advance the art, it's what a leech does to benefit from real innovation.
Re:Typical Chinese (Score:4, Informative)
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