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As an American in tech media, it’s hard for me to understand how huge Xiaomi has become in such a short time. Xiaomi has become the world’s number one smartphone brand this year, but they have a tiny presence in the United States, operating a website that doesn’t even offer the product the brand is best known for: the smartphone. Xiaomi is the quintessential value brand in the smartphone world – their products offer great value, and there is a smartphone for everyone, regardless of the price.
To differentiate its products from each other, Xiaomi divides its products into several sub-brands, the most notable of which is “Mi”. Today, ten years after the launch of the first smartphone bearing the Mi brand, Xiaomi is ready to make a big change: it is now removing “Mi” from its product names. This rebranding started with the company’s new MIX 4 smartphone, and a company representative said XDA that all of its future products will follow.
Although the company is best known for its smartphones, Xiaomi also sells a lot of products in the categories of smart home, lifestyle and IT, including TVs, laptops, refrigerators, deep fryers, smart watches, scooters, robots, hair dryers and much more. Most of these products carry the Mi brand today, but that will change for any new products they launch.
Goodbye Mi, hello Xiaomi
Fun fact: Xiaomi’s first product to carry the Mi brand wasn’t actually a smartphone, but it was definitely related to smartphones. The company’s first product was actually MIUI, its Android-based operating system which is now at version 12.5. Early visitors to the XDA forums may remember when the community considered MIUI to be the most popular “custom ROM” on the planet. What many didn’t realize at the time was that the developers behind MIUI had far bigger ambitions than maintaining an Android fork.
At the end of 2011, Xiaomi launched its very first smartphone, the Mi 1. This smartphone contained flagship specs (at the time), including Qualcomm’s dual-core Snapdragon S3 chipset, 1 GB of RAM and a resolution of 4 inches 854 × 480 LCD screen. Of course, it was also running MIUI on Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
In the following years, Xiaomi continued to offer new smartphones in its Mi series, all of which are available exclusively in China. At the end of 2013, Xiaomi hired Hugo Barra from Google, who at the time was vice president and product spokesperson for Android. Under Barra’s leadership, Xiaomi has expanded to other parts of Asia, most notably Singapore, but most notably India, a country that has become the key to Xiaomi’s global success. Xiaomi’s first products to launch outside of China were the Mi 3 and Redmi 2, the latter being the second product in the company’s Redmi sub-brand, which has since grown considerably and has become crucial. for Xiaomi’s global strategy.
The Xiaomi Mi3 in its recycled cardboard packaging. Source: Roland Tanglao on Flickr
The global launch of the Mi 3 and Redmi 2 opened the floodgates for Xiaomi, and they quickly expanded to more markets, launched more smartphones, and expanded into other product categories. Since Barra’s departure in 2017, Xiaomi has risen to the number one spot in the Indian smartphone market and has allegedly dethroned Samsung in Europe. There are many factors that have helped make Xiaomi the number one smartphone brand in the world, including the decline of Huawei and the supply constraints induced by COVID-19, but I was not surprised to learn that they have finally reached the top this year. Xiaomi makes great products, and there isn’t a single segment that they’re afraid to compete in, whether it’s budget phones, ultra-premium flagships, concept phones, or foldable phones.
Lei Jun, co-founder and CEO of Xiaomi, once commented on the origin of the company name. “Mi”, he said, stands for two things: “mobile internet” and “Mission Impossible”. Xiaomi sees itself as a mobile internet company that sets out to accomplish “impossible” tasks, which you will hear a lot during the company’s product presentations. The word “Xiaomi” itself translates into English as “millet”, a small-grain crop, while “Xiao” translates to “small”. Lei Jun thus linked the name of the company to the concept that a grain of rice for a Buddhist is as big as a mountain, which means that the company focused on the little things before rising. .
Now that Xiaomi has become the world’s number one smartphone brand, they might think it’s time for customers to associate their products with the company name rather than ‘Mi’. It appears that in China, the company already sells devices without a “Mi” in the name, so the move also aligned its global product naming strategy with its Chinese strategy. Don’t think for a second that this will clear up any confusion about branding the company’s products by market, because it’s always a huge mess.
Screenshot of Xiaomi’s Chinese online store, showing product names for several smartphones.
Mi, Redmi and POCO are the three brands under which Xiaomi currently classifies all of its products. Soon that list will become Xiaomi, Redmi, and POCO, changing the conversation from sub-brands to independent brands (Redmi and POCO both were derived from Xiaomi a few years ago) to three competing companies, or at least l illusion of it.
Featured Image: Xiaomi’s Old Logo
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