Xiaomi has become the fifth biggest smartphone maker worldwide, surpassing South Korean electronics giant LG. This is the third Chinese company to take a top-five spot, with Huawei and Lenovo currently in third and fourth, respectively.
The traction from China has increased immensely in the past year, kicking out a worldwide company from the top five and lowering Samsung and Apple sales year-on-year, for the first time in four years.
This could be extremely bad news for Apple and Samsung. Apple has not managed to grab a secure spot in the Chinese market and Samsung is starting to lose grips against younger companies, based in China.
China currently has around 300 million users with smartphones, India is a little less with around 200 million. This is still larger than the United States, Russia and all of the European countries, showing the mass audience available in these two Asian countries.
Xiaomi has had the most growth year-on-year, going from 1.8 percent in 2013 to 5.1 percent in Q2 2014. At this rate, Xiaomi could surpass both Lenovo and Huawei, becoming the biggest Chinese manufacturer and on point to challenge Apple.
This is even more likely, considering Xiaomi hired Hugo Barra to begin the global expansion of the company. The cheap high-end products make up for most of Xiaomi’s revenue, but they also have a surprisingly impressive low-end range.
If Xiaomi can become successful in India and other countries, they could become the new third powerhouse in the mobile industry. They would need to invest heavily in UI teams though, since a lot of MIUI’s services are local to China.
LG might be out of the top five, but that doesn’t mean they have had a bad year. The LG G3 is currently on track to beat the Galaxy S5 in early sales and the company has established themselves as a dominant force in plenty of countries.
