Xiaomi Mobile’s Shipment Increased by 58%, Re-entering Global Top Five
For a long time, in IDC, Gartner, Strategy Analytics and other rankings of global mobile phone shipments, Xiaomi didn’t rank top five.
Looking through the previous information, you can see the last time Xiaomi entered the global top five was in Q2 last year. According to Gartner, at that time, Xiaomi had 15.53 million shipments, ranking fifth and only accounting for 4.5% of the whole market share.
However, after three quarters, Xiaomi once again listed as global top five.
On August 2nd, the latest data from research firm Strategy Analytics showed that in Q2 this year, Xiaomi’s shipment increased, which enabled it to list as the top five manufacturers in terms of smart phone shipments. Meanwhile, vivo which previously took Xiaomi’s place was knocked out from the top five.
In Q2, the global smart phone shipments increased by 5.5% to 360 million. The shipment of Xiaomi mobile is 23.2 million (ranking the fifth place), up by 58% than that of 14.7 million over the same period last year. The market share of Xiaomi in Q2 is 6.4% higher than that of 4.3% over the same period last year (slightly different from the Gartner data). Xiaomi mobile’s robust performance mainly benefited from emerging markets such as India.
The director of Strategy Analytics said, “Global smartphone shipments reached 360.4 million in Q2 of 2017, up by 6% year on year. And this growth mainly benefits from the first-time buyers in emerging markets such as Africa as well as consumers in developed countries such as Western European countries who want to upgrade their Android mobile. These two also increase the volume of global smartphone shipments from 1.0% last year to 5.5% of the same period this year.
Specifically, Samsung, Apple, Huawei and OPPO list top one to top four respectively with 79.5 million, 41 million, 38.4 million and 29.5 million mobile shipments. In terms of market share, both Apple and Apple drop their share, while Huawei, OPPO and Xiaomi, three China’s mobile phone manufacturers, have more share than before.
In fact, at the beginning of last month, Xiaomi reported good news. On July 7th, Lei Jun issued an internal letter announcing that the shipments of mobile phones in Q2 of 2017 reached 23.16 million (Strategy Analytics has a similar data with that released by the Xiaomi), which grew by 70% than Q1. The volume of shipments in Q2 is the highest since the birth of Xiaomi mobile seven years ago.
The internal letter also pointed out that this year is the first year that Xiaomi’s international business fully breaks out. Especially Indian market has prominent performance. In the first half of this year, the performance in this region increased by 328% and ranked the second in terms of market share. Xiaomi has become India’s most popular mobile phone brand, and Redmi Note4X has become the best-selling one in local. Meanwhile, Xiaomi has achieved remarkable results in Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine and other countries.
From these figures, Xiaomi has gone through its worst time. In the face of such gratifying results, Lei Jun is excited but also puts some pressure on the team: a small goal of 100 million mobile phone shipments next year.
In the beginning, Xiaomi achieved remarkable results in a very short time which couldn’t be achieved by others by means of online hungry marketing and manufacturing mobile with other service providers. However, the problem of this lightweight model is also exploding. OPPO and vivo take advantage of its profound offline accumulation and strong marketing techniques quickly surpassed Xiaomi. As a result, Xiaomi fell from the first down to the fifth in China’s mobile phone shipments. At that time, though Lei Jun praised his own mobile in front of the media, the public only felt Xiaomi is in dismal condition.
In order to take back its seat, Xiaomi mainly prepared in three aspects: First, accelerating the process of internationalization; Second, build up offline retail store; Third, strengthen technology development.
The above mentions the success of Xiaomi’s internationalization. In the internal letter, Lei Jun also mentioned the technical innovations Xiaomi achieved, such as the release of S1 chip released in February, optical zoom and dual photo function released in April, and Xiaomi Max2 released in May. In short, Xiaomi applied for 7071 patents worldwide last year, and got 2895 patents (half of which were international invention patents).
In addition, as for on-line channel construction, by July 7th, the number of stores in China had reached 123. Flat effect is second only to Apple. And on July 8th, it is expected to open another 14 stores.
Earlier, Wang Xiang, vice senior president of Xiaomi, said in an interview with foreign media CNBC “in the next three years, Xiaomi plans to open 2000 new stores around the world. Half of them will be operated overseas with local partners; and the other half will be run in China independently by Xiaomi. Opening shop is an important measure for Xiaomi to realize its ambition of expanding globally.”
He also said that in the future, every country in the world would have Xiaomi.
Looking back, perhaps Xiaomi did decline in the past year. But the post-attack Xiaomi may do better than many Chinese companies in the aspect of internationalization.
This article originally appeared in 36kr and was translated by Pandaily.
Click here to read the original Chinese article.
