IDC: Xiaomi is 3rd biggest smartphone maker in the world (after Samsung and Apple)

[Eug]

Wow impressive increase in sales.

http://m.idc.com//pressRelease/prUS25224914

I haven't been following Xiaomi that much. What's responsible for the surge? It seems mostly domestic in China though. Their exposure in North America for example is not very high.

 

[Bateluer]

Wow impressive increase in sales.

http://m.idc.com//pressRelease/prUS25224914

I haven't been following Xiaomi that much. What's responsible for the surge? It seems mostly domestic in China though. Their exposure in North America for example is not very high.

Shrug. China's 'China Mobile' carrier has over 760 million subscribers, more than double the population of the entire United States. China has over 1.3 billion potential customers. Easy to rack up sales with that kind of market base.

 

[Eug]

Being the 3rd biggest manufacturer in the world for anything important is never "easy".

 

[cronos]

Low to mid level devices, focusing on Asian market (yes, in Singapore, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, etc. as well, not just China), and market it really hard.

Basically like the old Nokia, though in Asia first instead of Europe.

 

[Eug]

What are the sales numbers for Samsung's phone hardware tiers? I always thought that most of Samsung's sales were low to mid level devices too, although I could be wrong. Yes, the flagships get super high individual model sales, but Samsung has many, many models.

 

[Roland00Address]

Developed asia and developing asia are big markets.

More smartphones are sold in the US than all the major EU players put together:

That graph doesn't break down high-end and low-end, but I bet either China or the US leads there.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36751311&postcount=23

GfK translated from German is, Society for Consumer Research. GfK is Germany's largest market research institute

http://blog.gfk.com/2014/07/smart-value-in-the-smartphone-market-the-highs-and-lows/

So for above $500 average selling price smartphones, what I will now call flagship phones (instead of budget phones even though their are things such as midrange phones but these are dying/reducing in price tremendously as the second graph illustrates).

It looks like for 2014 new Asia 84 million flagship smartphones (52 million China+32 million India and other emerging Asia) vs 64 million North America, 46 million developed Asia (Japan, South Korea, and such), 46 million Western Europe

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36751695&postcount=24

 

[s44]

Ha ha, this position apparently lasted for just a few hours, as Lenovo passed them by closing the Moto acquisition.

 

[kpkp]

Low to mid level devices, focusing on Asian market (yes, in Singapore, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, etc. as well, not just China), and market it really hard.

Basically like the old Nokia, though in Asia first instead of Europe.

They make mid-high end devices for low-mid level prices, I think that's a more accurate description.

 

[desura]

I'm pretty impressed with Xiaomi.

 

[StrangerGuy]

When you can make a phone with Snapdragon 400/720P/8MP/Dual SIM/microSD support for US$130 non-contract its hard to not sell in huge numbers. Compared to the millions of other confusing, rubbish specced phones from Samsung in similar the price bracket.

Even Xiaomi is way better than Samsung in cutting corners by opting for non-backlight buttons and non-optically bonded LCD to save money for things like a decent SoC and a 720p IPS panel than putting stupid 800x480 screens and slowass 1.2GHz dual cores in 2014 on cheap phones.