Xiaomi

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 30th of December 2014, Xiaomi put its Redmi Note 4G phone on sale through the Indian retailer Flipkart. It sold out in six seconds. The sale came only weeks after a court in Delhi had banned the company's products from India.

  Headquartered in Beijing, Xiaomi ranked as the third-largest smartphone seller in the world in 2025, behind only Apple and Samsung. By December 2025 it counted 754.1 million monthly active users. It was also the youngest company on the Fortune Global 500, and commentators have long called it the "Apple of China".

  How does a company named after a grain of millet earn that kind of nickname? How does it hold prices close to its costs and still grow? And why did a phone maker founded in 2010 end up building cars, designing its own chips and training language models?

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• 2. Millet and Mission Impossible

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  On the 6th of April 2010, Lei Jun co-founded Xiaomi in Beijing with six associates. Among them were Lin Bin, a vice president at the Google China Institute of Engineering, and Zhou Guangping, a senior director at the Motorola Beijing R&D center. Liu De chaired the industrial design department at the University of Science and Technology Beijing. Li Wanqiang had run Kingsoft Dictionary, and Hong Feng was a senior product manager at Google China.

  Lei himself had been an executive at Kingsoft. He had also helped found and manage Joyo.com, which Amazon bought for $75 million in 2004. By his own account, he was dissatisfied with the phones other manufacturers sold, and he believed he could build a better one.

  Software came first. On the 16th of August 2010, the company launched MIUI, an Android-based firmware that is now called Xiaomi HyperOS. The first handset, the Xiaomi Mi 1, followed in August 2011.

  The visual identity was simple. The first logo was an orange square with the white letters MI in its center, and it lasted until the 31st of March 2021. The Japanese designer Kenya Hara then replaced the square with a rounded squircle in a slightly darker hue, keeping the letters unchanged.

  The mascot is a white rabbit named Mitu. It wears an ushanka, which people in China call a Lei Feng hat, and a red pioneer tie. The hat originally carried a red star, which was later swapped for the company logo.

  Then there is the name. Xiaomi is the Chinese word for millet. In 2011, Lei suggested it held more meanings than millet and rice. He tied the first syllable, meaning small, to a Buddhist idea about the weight of a single grain, and read it as a promise to start from little things instead of chasing perfection.

  The second syllable, mi, he described as an acronym for Mobile Internet, and also for mission impossible, a nod to the obstacles of starting out. He added that he simply thought the name was cute. A year later he said it was about revolution and bringing innovation to a new area.

  That second reading has drawn attention to a Chinese Communist Party idiom, millet and rifle, from the Second Sino-Japanese War. A later Xiaomi processor called Rifle has lent weight to the connection.

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• 3. Thin Margins

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  Eighteen months is how long Xiaomi tends to keep most of its products on sale, which is longer than most smartphone makers manage. That slow cycle lets the company price devices close to what they cost to manufacture and assemble from parts. It also pairs inventory optimization with flash sales, so stock stays low.

  Flash sales drew official scrutiny in August 2014. The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission investigated three of them. Xiaomi had claimed it sold 10,000 units in each of the first two and 8,000 in the third.

  The commission counted 9,339, then 9,492, then 7,389. It also found that 1,750 priority codes in the first sale let some buyers skip the queue, which shrank the stock open to everyone else. The regulator fined the company.

  Cheap did not have to mean modest. In April 2018, Xiaomi announced a gaming brand called Black Shark, with 6GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 845 chip for $508, below its competitors. That August came POCO, a mid-range line that first launched in India.

  Its Pocophone F1 became the best-selling smartphone sold online in India in the last quarter of 2018. People sometimes called it a flagship killer for offering high-end specifications at a low price. POCO India became its own sub-brand on the 17th of January 2020, and a global counterpart followed on the 24th of November 2020.

  The sister Redmi line kept piling up numbers. By December 2022, global cumulative sales of the Redmi Note series had passed 300 million units.

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• 4. Racing Beyond China

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  The money arrived in rounds. In 2010, Xiaomi raised $41 million in a Series A. In December 2011 it raised $90 million in a Series B. In June 2012 came $216 million in a Series C at a $4 billion valuation, with investors including Temasek Holdings, IDG Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Qualcomm.

  In August 2013, the company hired Hugo Barra, who had been a vice president of product management for Android at Google. It was the first time a smartphone seller had poached a senior member of Google's Android team. Barra's job was to take Xiaomi beyond mainland China, and he left in February 2017.

  The numbers climbed fast. In October 2013, Xiaomi became the fifth most used smartphone brand in China, and it sold 18.7 million phones that year. In 2014 it sold over 60 million, and 94% of its revenue came from handsets.

  In December 2014, Xiaomi raised US$1.1 billion at a valuation above US$45 billion. The round was led by All-Stars Investment Limited, a Hong Kong fund run by Richard Ji, a former Morgan Stanley analyst. Ratan Tata acquired a stake in April 2015.

  Going abroad took real estate, even online. In April 2014, the company paid a record US$3.6 million for the domain name mi.com, the most expensive domain name ever bought in China. Two months earlier it had announced an international headquarters in Singapore.

  Brazil came first, on the 30th of June 2015, with a locally made Redmi 2. It was the first phone Xiaomi assembled outside China. The company left Brazil in the second half of 2016.

  India proved far more welcoming. In the third quarter of 2017, Xiaomi overtook Samsung as the largest smartphone brand there, selling 9.2 million units in those three months. That year it also opened Mi Stores in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Europe's first Mi Store opened in Athens in October 2017, and sales began in Spain and western Europe on the 7th of November 2017.

  In June 2018, Xiaomi went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and raised $4.72 billion. In 2020 it sold 149.4 million smartphones, and in the third quarter of that year it shipped 46.2 million handsets to become the third-largest maker by volume.

  In July 2021, Canalys ranked it second in the world, and Counterpoint said it had passed Apple in Europe for the first time. The 2022 Fortune Global 500 placed Xiaomi 266th, a rise of 72 positions in one year.

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• 5. The Counterfeit Jobs

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  After reading a book about Steve Jobs in college, Lei Jun carefully cultivated a Jobs image. He wore jeans and dark shirts, and he copied Jobs' announcement style at Xiaomi's earlier product launches. Some commentators branded him a "counterfeit Jobs".

  Critics said the company's hunger marketing rode on the back of a cult of Apple. In 2013, they debated how much of Xiaomi's innovation was real and how much was good public relations. Defenders replied that Google's Android let Xiaomi customize software to user preferences, and that its product range was far wider than Apple's.

  On the 8th of February 2022, Lei posted a statement on Weibo that took the rivalry head on. Xiaomi would try to surpass Apple as the top seller of premium smartphones in China within three years. It would spend US$15.7 billion on research and development over five years and benchmark its products against Apple's lines.

  Lei called the plan a "life-or-death battle for our development". Xiaomi's share of the Chinese market had slipped from 17% to 14% between the second and third quarters of 2021, and then to 13.2% in the fourth.

  The premium push leaned on borrowed prestige. In 2021, the Mi 11 series became the first phones with a Harman Kardon-tuned dual speaker setup. Xiaomi also began commissioning directors to make short films shot entirely on Mi 11 phones.

  In 2022, it made two shorts with the actress Jessica Henwick. The first, Bus Girl, won several awards and was long-listed for Best British Short at the 2023 BAFTA.

  That same year, Leica Camera became Xiaomi's camera partner, succeeding Huawei in the role. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra and Xiaomi MIX Fold 2 launched in July and August 2022 as the first flagships of the pairing. In February 2026, Mobile World Congress announced a Leica Leitzphone powered by Xiaomi 17 Ultra, with an international launch set for the 6th of March 2026.

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• 6. Cars, Chips and Thinking Machines

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  On the 30th of March 2021, Xiaomi announced it would invest US$10 billion in electric vehicles over ten years. In late 2023, its car division, Xiaomi Auto, unveiled its first production model, the SU7, along with a goal of becoming one of the five largest automakers in the world.

  The SU7 sedan officially launched in Beijing on the 28th of March 2024. It was built under contract by BAIC Group until Xiaomi obtained its own production license in July 2024. Time put the company on its 2024 list of influential companies.

  Xiaomi's car factory sits in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area. It is organized around a proprietary die-casting system called the Hyper Die-Casting 79100 Cluster. At full capacity, the factory can reportedly produce an SU7 every 76 seconds.

  On the 26th of June 2025, the company launched the Xiaomi YU7, its first electric SUV. Deliveries surpassed 150,000 after the launch.

  Cars were not the only ambition. In June 2022, Xiaomi set up Zhuhai Xinshi Semiconductor Technology with registered capital of 200 million RMB. Its business scope covers chip design and manufacturing. In May 2025, Lei announced a 3nm mobile processor that Xiaomi had designed independently.

  The XRING O1 was officially released on the 22nd of May 2025. It was installed in the Xiaomi 15S Pro and the Xiaomi Pad 7 Ultra.

  In 2022, Xiaomi also showed off a humanoid robot prototype. Its abilities were very limited, and the unveiling mainly signaled the company's wish to build artificial intelligence into its designs.

  In April 2025 it released the MiMo-7B reasoning model. In October 2025 it quietly launched a free, ad-free short-drama app in China called Watch Short Dramas, which reportedly drew about 20,000 downloads soon after release.

  In 2025, the World Intellectual Property Organization ranked Xiaomi eighth in the world for patent applications published under its PCT system, with 1,889 published during 2024. A year earlier, the organization ranked it fifth for industrial design registrations, with 315 designs published under the Hague System in 2023.

  On the 18th of April 2026, Xiaomi released MiMo-V2-Pro, a language model with a trillion parameters. Lei Jun announced that the company planned to invest at least US$8.7 billion in artificial intelligence over the following three years.

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• 7. Courts and Blacklists

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  In November 2012, Xiaomi's smart set-top box stopped working one week after launch. The company had broken regulations set by China's National Radio and Television Administration. It cleared the regulatory problem in January 2013.

  On the 9th of December 2014, the Delhi High Court granted an ex parte injunction banning the import and sale of Xiaomi products in India. The order answered a complaint by Ericsson over a patent licensed on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

  On the 16th of December, the court let Xiaomi keep selling devices that ran on Qualcomm processors until the 8th of January 2015. A judge later extended an interim order that allowed those sales to continue until March 2018.

  Patents shaped the rest of the legal story. In June 2016, Xiaomi acquired patents from Microsoft, and in July 2017 it signed a licensing agreement with Nokia. In September 2023, Huawei and Xiaomi agreed to a global cross-licensing deal covering several communications technologies, including 5G.

  On the 19th of January 2021, the Dutch carrier KPN sued Xiaomi and others for patent infringement. In October 2023, the Regional Court of Duesseldorf stopped hearing the case at Xiaomi's request. In July 2021, Xiaomi accused Wyze Labs of infringing its robot vacuum patent, and Wyze sued in a United States court, arguing that prior art invalidated it.

  India's Enforcement Directorate seized Xiaomi assets in April 2022 as part of an investigation into foreign exchange law violations. In May 2022, an Indian court lifted a $725 million freeze on the company.

  On the 14th of January 2021, five days before the end of Donald Trump's first presidency, the United States named Xiaomi a company owned or controlled by the People's Liberation Army. That barred American companies and individuals from investing in it. Xiaomi sued on the 17th of February 2021.

  On the 12th of March 2021, a federal court blocked the ban, doubted the national security claims and called the blacklisting "deeply flawed". Xiaomi denied any military ties. In May 2021, it reached an agreement with the Department of Defense to remove the designation.

  In July 2024, Lei said the sanctions list was the reason Xiaomi decided to build cars.

  Russia raised a different problem. Since 2018, Xiaomi has been the top-selling brand in Russian online stores. After the invasion of Ukraine, it suspended marketing there, yet in July 2022 it and POCO together held 42% of the Russian market.

  On the 13th of April 2023, Ukraine's National Agency on Corruption Prevention put Xiaomi and 13 of its senior executives on a list of "international sponsors of war". On the 21st of September 2023, Finnish carriers Telia, DNA and Elisa halted sales of Xiaomi products over the company's business in Russia.

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• 8. Code, Data and Trust

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  In January 2018, the Android developer Francisco Franco publicly criticized Xiaomi for delaying the release of its kernel source code. The Android Linux kernel falls under the GNU General Public License, which requires distributing the full source for every device. Xiaomi had said in 2013 that it would release the code, and it appeared on GitHub in 2020.

  Privacy questions followed from the company's home base. Because Xiaomi is based in China, it must share data with the Chinese government under the China Internet Security Law and the National Intelligence Law.

  Reports also said its Cloud messaging service sent private data, including call logs and contact information, to Xiaomi servers. A later MIUI update made the service optional, and Xiaomi said no private data went to its servers when it was switched off.

  On the 23rd of October 2014, the company announced servers outside China for international users, citing better service and compliance with local regulations.

  In September 2021, amid a political spat between China and Lithuania, the Lithuanian defense ministry urged people to dispose of Chinese-made phones. The country's cyber security center claimed Xiaomi devices had built-in censorship that could be switched on remotely.

  Xiaomi denied it, saying it "does not censor communications to or from its users". It said it would engage a third party to assess the claims and pointed to ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27701 compliance as evidence of following European data rules.

  In May 2025, researchers from Princeton University and Citizen Lab examined the encryption in the top 800 apps in Xiaomi's Mi Store. They found that 47.6% used non-standard and weak encryption, which left app traffic open to eavesdropping. By comparison, only 3.5% of the top 800 Google Play apps showed the same weakness.

  The researchers put the cumulative number of vulnerable app downloads above 130 billion.

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