Xiaomi
Xiaomi Corporation (小米; pinyin: Xiǎomǐ) is a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Beijing. It is best known for consumer electronics, software and, since 2024, electric vehicles. As of 2025 it is the third-largest smartphone vendor in the world behind Apple and Samsung, and it reported 754.1 million global monthly active users as of December 2025. Ranked 232nd on the Fortune Global 500, it is the youngest company on that list.
| Xiaomi Corporation | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | SEHK: 1810 |
| Industry | Consumer electronics, software, electric vehicles |
| Founded | 6 April 2010, Beijing, China |
| Founder | Lei Jun, Lin Bin, Zhou Guangping, Liu De, Li Wanqiang, Huang Jiangji, Hong Feng |
| Headquarters | Beijing, China |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Lei Jun (founder, chairman and CEO) Lu Weibing (president) |
| Products | Smartphones, smart home appliances, wearables, televisions, electric vehicles, semiconductors |
| Services | Xiaomi HyperOS, internet services, Mi Store retail |
| Subsidiaries | Xiaomi Auto, POCO, Redmi, Black Shark, Xiaomi Semiconductor |
| Website | mi.com |
Xiaomi was founded in 2010 by Lei Jun and six associates, and released its first smartphone in August 2011. By 2014 it held the largest share of the Chinese smartphone market. The company initially sold only online, using flash sales and long product lifecycles to hold prices close to the bill of materials, before opening physical stores. It has since expanded into a wide range of connected consumer products and, most consequentially, into automobiles.
Xiaomi has frequently been called the Apple of China, a description that captures both the company's design ambitions and the persistent criticism that its early identity was derivative. Its history is also inseparable from the geopolitics of Chinese technology: a United States investment ban in 2021, subsequently overturned in court, directly prompted the decision to build cars.
History
Founding and early years, 2010 to 2013
Xiaomi was co-founded on 6 April 2010 by Lei Jun together with six others, each recruited from a senior position in the Chinese technology industry:
- Lin Bin (林斌), vice president of the Google China Institute of Engineering
- Zhou Guangping (周光平), senior director of the Motorola Beijing research and development centre
- Liu De (刘德), department chair of industrial design at the University of Science and Technology Beijing
- Li Wanqiang (黎万强), general manager of Kingsoft Dictionary
- Huang Jiangji (黄江吉), principal development manager
- Hong Feng (洪峰), senior product manager for Google China
Lei had been an executive at Kingsoft and was involved in founding and managing Joyo.com, which was sold to Amazon for 75 million dollars in 2004. He has said that he started Xiaomi because he was dissatisfied with the products of existing handset manufacturers and believed he could build something better.
The company's first release was not a phone but software. On 16 August 2010 it launched MIUI, an Android-based firmware, later renamed Xiaomi HyperOS. Building a user community around a custom Android distribution before shipping hardware was an unusual sequence, and it gave Xiaomi a base of enthusiasts who were already invested in the product when the first handset appeared.
Xiaomi raised 41 million dollars in a Series A round in 2010. The first phone, the Xiaomi Mi 1, launched in August 2011 with MIUI installed. A Series B round of 90 million dollars followed in December 2011, and in June 2012 a Series C round raised 216 million dollars at a four billion dollar valuation. Institutional investors in the early rounds included Temasek Holdings, IDG Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Qualcomm.
In August 2013 Xiaomi hired Hugo Barra from Google, where he had been vice president of product management for Android, to lead expansion outside mainland China. It was the first time a smartphone company had recruited a senior member of Google's Android team, and it signalled international intent well before the company had the capacity to deliver on it. Barra left in February 2017.
In September 2013 Xiaomi announced the Mi 3 and an Android-based 47-inch 3D-capable smart television assembled by Wistron of Taiwan. By October it was the fifth most used smartphone brand in China, and it sold 18.7 million handsets over the year.
International expansion, 2014 to 2020
Xiaomi announced its expansion outside China in February 2014, establishing an international headquarters in Singapore. In April it bought the domain name mi.com for 3.6 million dollars, the most expensive domain purchase recorded in China, replacing xiaomi.com as its primary address.
In September 2014 the company acquired a 24.7 per cent stake in Roborock, the robotic vacuum manufacturer that became one of the most successful members of its ecosystem. In December 2014 Xiaomi raised 1.1 billion dollars at a valuation above 45 billion dollars, making it briefly one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world. The round was led by All-Stars Investment, a Hong Kong fund run by the former Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji.
The company sold more than 60 million smartphones in 2014, with 94 per cent of revenue coming from handsets. Ratan Tata acquired a stake in April 2015.
The first attempt at manufacturing outside China came on 30 June 2015, when Xiaomi launched the locally assembled Redmi 2 in Brazil. The venture failed and the company withdrew from Brazil in the second half of 2016.
The middle years of the decade established a steady product cadence built around Qualcomm Snapdragon processors: the Mi 5 in February 2016, the Redmi Note 3 Pro in India in March, the Mi Max in May and the Mi Mix in October, the last of these notable for a near-bezel-free display that anticipated an industry-wide design shift. In June 2016 Xiaomi acquired patents from Microsoft, and in September it entered the European Union through a partnership with ABC Data. A patent licensing agreement with Nokia followed in July 2017.
India became Xiaomi's most important foreign market. In the third quarter of 2017 the company overtook Samsung to become the largest smartphone brand in the country, selling 9.2 million units in the quarter. It announced a second Indian manufacturing plant with Foxconn in March 2017, and in August 2018 its principal supplier Holitech Technology committed up to 200 million dollars over three years to a new Indian plant.
In September 2017 Xiaomi released the Mi A1, its first Android One device, under the slogan Created by Xiaomi, Powered by Google. Mi Stores opened in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 2017, with the first European store in Athens in October and sales beginning in Spain and western Europe in November.
Xiaomi became a public company in June 2018 through an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising 4.72 billion dollars. In the same year it launched the gaming brand Black Shark and the mid-range POCO line, first in India. The Pocophone F1 became the best-selling smartphone sold online in India in the fourth quarter of 2018 and was widely described as a flagship killer for offering high-end specifications at a substantially lower price.
The company opened new Beijing headquarters in July 2019 after almost four years of construction, announced plans for more than ten 5G phones in 2020, and entered the Japanese market in November 2019 through a dedicated subsidiary. POCO became a separate sub-brand in India in January 2020 and globally that November.
By October 2020 Xiaomi was the third-largest smartphone maker in the world by shipment volume, shipping 46.2 million handsets in the third quarter.
Diversification and automobiles, since 2021
On 30 March 2021 Xiaomi announced that it would invest ten billion dollars in electric vehicles over ten years. The following day it unveiled a new logo designed by the Japanese designer Kenya Hara.
In July 2021 Canalys reported that Xiaomi had become the second largest smartphone maker in the world, and Counterpoint recorded it surpassing Apple in Europe for the first time. In August the company acquired the autonomous driving business Deepmotion for 77 million dollars.
Xiaomi moved into semiconductors with the establishment of Zhuhai Xinshi Semiconductor Technology in June 2022, capitalised at 200 million yuan and covering integrated circuit design and manufacturing. In May 2025 Lei Jun announced the XRING O1, a 3-nanometre mobile processor designed in-house, which shipped in the Xiaomi 15S Pro and the Pad 7 Ultra later that month. The achievement placed Xiaomi among a very small group of handset makers designing their own leading-edge application processors.
The automotive programme moved quickly. Xiaomi Auto unveiled its first production vehicle, the SU7 sedan, in late 2023 and launched it in Beijing on 28 March 2024, initially manufactured under contract with BAIC Group. Xiaomi obtained its own electric vehicle production licence in July 2024. Its factory in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area is built around a proprietary integrated die-casting system, the Hyper Die-Casting 79100 Cluster, which the company says allows an SU7 to be produced every 76 seconds at full capacity. The YU7, its first electric sport utility vehicle, launched in June 2025 and surpassed 150,000 deliveries. Xiaomi was included in Time's 2024 list of influential companies.
Artificial intelligence became the next stated priority. Xiaomi released the MiMo-7B reasoning model in April 2025, and on 18 April 2026 released MiMo-V2-Pro, a trillion-parameter large language model, alongside Lei Jun's announcement that the company would invest at least 8.7 billion dollars in artificial intelligence over three years.
Other developments in the period included a global patent cross-licensing agreement with Huawei covering 5G and other communications technologies in September 2023, Redmi's demonstration of 300-watt fast charging in February 2023, cumulative Redmi Note series sales passing 300 million units in December 2022, and the quiet launch in October 2025 of a Chinese short-drama application distributed through Xiaomi's own app store.
Business model
Xiaomi's commercial approach differs from that of most handset manufacturers in a way that has been consistent since its founding. The company prices hardware close to its manufacturing and bill of materials cost, accepting margins that conventional consumer electronics businesses would regard as unviable, and expects to earn its return from internet services, advertising and the wider ecosystem of connected products sold to the resulting user base. Lei Jun has publicly committed to capping net hardware margins at five per cent.
Three operational practices support this. Products remain on the market for approximately 18 months, considerably longer than the industry norm, which spreads development costs over a longer run and allows component prices to fall while the retail price holds. Inventory is deliberately kept low. Flash sales, in which limited quantities are released at announced times, both manage inventory risk and generate demand signals, though the practice has drawn regulatory attention.
The ecosystem strategy extends the model. Rather than manufacturing every category itself, Xiaomi invests in and incubates independent companies that build products designed to its specifications and sold through its channels. Roborock is the most prominent example. The approach gave Xiaomi a catalogue spanning televisions, air purifiers, scooters, luggage, lighting and small appliances without carrying the development cost of each.
Corporate identity
Name
Xiǎomǐ (小米) is the Chinese word for millet. Lei Jun has offered several readings. In 2011 he connected xiǎo (小, small) to the Buddhist idea that a single grain of rice is as great as a mountain, suggesting that the company should begin from small things rather than striving immediately for perfection, and described mǐ (米) as an acronym for Mobile Internet and also for mission impossible, a reference to the obstacles of the founding period. He added that he simply thought the name was appealing. In 2012 he described it as being about revolution and bringing innovation into a new field.
Xiaomi's later naming of a processor the Rifle gave weight to commentators who linked the name to the Chinese Communist Party's millet and rifles (小米加步枪) idiom from the Second Sino-Japanese War, denoting victory achieved with minimal resources.
Logo and mascot
The original logo was an orange square containing the letters MI in white. It remained in use until 31 March 2021, when a replacement by Kenya Hara retained the same letterforms but substituted a squircle with rounded corners for the square, in a slightly darker hue. The redesign attracted attention, and some ridicule, for the reported cost relative to the modesty of the visible change; Hara's explanation rested on a mathematical formulation of the shape and on an underlying design philosophy of what he termed Alive.
The company mascot, Mitu, is a white rabbit wearing an ushanka, known in China as a Lei Feng hat, with a red star and a red pioneer tie. The star was later replaced by the company logo.
Operations
Xiaomi's principal business remains smartphones, sold under the Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO brands, which occupy premium, value and online-focused mid-range positions respectively. The Black Shark line addresses mobile gaming.
The smart home ecosystem covers televisions, air purifiers, robotic vacuums, wearables, lighting, small appliances and unmanned aerial vehicles, connected through the Xiaomi Smart Home platform and the HyperOS operating system.
Xiaomi Auto manufactures the SU7 sedan and YU7 sport utility vehicle. Xiaomi Semiconductor designs processors and other silicon. The company also operates a real estate initiative, the Xiaomi Youth Apartments in Beijing and Nanjing, offering 2,658 furnished smart homes fitted with Xiaomi appliances at approximately 290 dollars a month, aimed at its own younger employees.
Research and development spending has risen sharply. In February 2022 Lei announced 15.7 billion dollars of research investment over five years as part of a push into the premium segment, following a contraction in Xiaomi's Chinese market share from 17 per cent in the second quarter of 2021 to 13.2 per cent by the fourth. He described the strategy on Weibo as a life-or-death battle for the company's development.
The company is a substantial holder of intellectual property. The World Intellectual Property Organization's 2025 annual review of the Patent Cooperation Treaty ranked Xiaomi eighth in the world, with 1,889 applications published during 2024, and its 2024 review of industrial designs ranked the company fifth with 315 designs published under the Hague System during 2023.
Controversies
Imitation of Apple
Xiaomi has been described by numerous commentators as imitating Apple, with its hunger marketing characterised as riding on the cult of Apple. After reading a book about Steve Jobs in college, Lei Jun cultivated a Jobs-like public image at early product announcements, including the jeans, dark shirts and presentation style, and was characterised in the press as a counterfeit Jobs.
In 2013 critics debated how much of Xiaomi's output was genuine innovation and how much was effective public relations. Defenders argue that the extensive software customisation permitted by Android differentiates the products substantially, and that Xiaomi has developed a far wider range of consumer categories than Apple has attempted. The criticism has diminished as the company's own engineering, particularly in charging technology, display design and latterly silicon, has moved ahead of the products it was once accused of copying.
GNU General Public License compliance
In January 2018 Xiaomi was criticised for failing to comply with the terms of the GNU General Public License. The Linux kernel used by Android is licensed under the copyleft terms of the GPL, which require Xiaomi to distribute complete kernel source code and device trees for every Android device it ships. Repeated delays in these releases placed the company in violation of intellectual property law in China, a WIPO member state. The Android developer Francisco Franco publicly criticised the conduct. Xiaomi had stated in 2013 that it would release the code, and kernel sources became available on GitHub in 2020.
Privacy and data collection
As a company based in China, Xiaomi is obliged to share data with the Chinese government under the China Internet Security Law and the National Intelligence Law, a structural obligation that applies regardless of the company's own intentions and that underlies much of the international scrutiny it attracts.
Reports indicated that Xiaomi's cloud messaging service transmitted private data, including call logs and contact information, to Xiaomi servers. The company subsequently released a MIUI update making cloud messaging optional and stated that no private data was sent when the service was disabled. On 23 October 2014 it announced that it was establishing servers outside China for international users, citing both service quality and regulatory compliance.
In May 2025 researchers from Princeton University and Citizen Lab published an analysis of the encryption used by the 800 most popular applications in Xiaomi's Chinese app store. They found that 47.6 per cent used non-standard and weak encryption protocols permitting third-party interception of application traffic, with cumulative downloads of affected applications exceeding 130 billion. The comparable figure for the top 800 applications on Google Play was 3.5 per cent.
Regulatory actions and litigation
In November 2012 Xiaomi's smart set-top box ceased operating a week after launch because the company had breached regulations of China's National Radio and Television Administration. The issues were resolved in January 2013.
In August 2014 the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission investigated Xiaomi's flash sales and found that fewer handsets had been sold than advertised. Against claimed figures of 10,000 units for each of the first two sales and 8,000 for the third, the actual numbers were 9,339, 9,492 and 7,389. The commission also found that Xiaomi had issued 1,750 priority codes allowing holders to bypass the first flash sale, reducing the stock publicly available. Xiaomi was fined 600,000 New Taiwan dollars.
On 9 December 2014 the Delhi High Court granted an ex parte injunction banning the import and sale of Xiaomi products in India, following a complaint by Ericsson alleging infringement of patents licensed on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. On 16 December the court permitted Xiaomi to sell devices using Qualcomm-based processors, and the permission was extended by a division bench until March 2018.
The Dutch telecommunications operator KPN sued Xiaomi and others for patent infringement in January 2021; the Regional Court of Düsseldorf ceased hearing the case in October 2023 at Xiaomi's request. In July 2021 Xiaomi reported Wyze Labs to Amazon alleging infringement of its 2019 robot vacuum patent, and Wyze responded with a suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington seeking a declaratory judgment that the patent was invalid on the basis of prior art.
In April 2022 India's Enforcement Directorate seized Xiaomi assets as part of an investigation into foreign exchange violations. The seizure was suspended by court order, then upheld, and in May 2022 an Indian court lifted a 725 million dollar freeze imposed by federal agencies. In November 2025 a court in Haikou ordered Xiaomi to refund double the deposit taken for an Aurora Purple SU7 Max after finding against the company over its advance payment requirement.
Lithuania censorship allegations
In September 2021, during a diplomatic dispute between China and Lithuania, the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence urged citizens to dispose of Chinese-made mobile phones and avoid buying new ones, after the country's National Cyber Security Centre reported that Xiaomi devices contained censorship capabilities that could be activated remotely. Xiaomi denied the allegations, stating that it does not censor communications to or from its users, and commissioned a third-party assessment. It also stated that it complied with the General Data Protection Regulation through ISO/IEC 27001 information security and ISO/IEC 27701 privacy management certification.
United States sanctions
On 14 January 2021, five days before the end of the first presidency of Donald Trump, the United States federal government designated Xiaomi a company owned or controlled by the People's Liberation Army, prohibiting American individuals and companies from investing in it.
Xiaomi filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on 17 February 2021. On 12 March the court blocked the investment ban, expressed scepticism about the government's national security claims and described the blacklisting as deeply flawed. Xiaomi denied any military ties and stated that its products and services were civilian and commercial. In May 2021 it reached an agreement with the United States Department of Defense to remove the designation.
The episode had lasting strategic consequences. Lei Jun said in July 2024 that the sanctions listing of January 2021 was the reason Xiaomi decided to build cars and establish its electric vehicle company, a direct causal link between American export policy and the emergence of a significant new competitor in the global automotive industry.
Operations in Russia
Xiaomi has been the best-selling brand in Russian online stores since 2018. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine the company suspended marketing in Russia, but by July 2022 Xiaomi and POCO together held 42 per cent of the Russian smartphone market, ranking first by sales.
On 13 April 2023 Ukraine's National Agency on Corruption Prevention added Xiaomi Corporation and thirteen of its senior executives to its list of international sponsors of war, on the basis that the company had continued to operate in Russia and remained the leading seller of smartphones there. On 21 September 2023 the Finnish mobile carriers Telia, DNA and Elisa halted sales of Xiaomi products over the company's continuing Russian business.
See also
References