Xiaomi managed to grew 116 percent year over year. The moves to markets like India obviously paid off. It looks like 2018 is the year it expands to Europe and we still see potential for growth for the China brand.

According to a Canalyst report, Xiaomi had 3.7 percent of market share in Q1 2017 out of 349 million total units shipped. In Q1 2018 Xiaomi increased its market share to 8.4 percent and scored a 116 percent growth. Needless to say that this is nothing short of an exceptional feat.

Fudzilla realized the potential of this fast-growing brand in 2012 when the company launched the Xiaomi Mi2 phone based on the Snapdragon S2 SoC. The phone had top of the notch specs and was selling for 1999 Yuan or some $300 at the time. A year after that, the company hired Hugo Bara - a key name from Google - to help up with its roadmap and strategy.

Some five years after Hugo joined Xiaomi, it is the number four player behind Samsung, Apple and Huawei.

Big gains in eight years

We strongly believe that Xiaomi has one of the best IoT strategies of all the companies we follow. It figured out something that big players like Samsung, Philips and even Google and Amazon cannot. At the same time, it created a fan base around the brand that really helps the sales.

Xiaomi was selling around 15 million phones in Q1 2017, managing to jump to over 20 million the next quarter. Already by Q3 it grew to over 25 million units shipped and stayed at that stage for the Q4 2017 and Q1 2018.

One of the big issues is that the market in US and Europe doesn’t really pays attention to Chinese brands and most people don’t even know about the Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, companies that sell tens of millions of very high quality phones.

Xiaomi also has a big spread of devices starting as low as $100 and even these devices are winning massive amounts of market share. Samsung and especially Apple don’t have a good handle in this part of the market.

Xiaomi Redmi 5A 16GB, for example, currently sells for less than €100, great value for a five inch 720 phone with Android 7.1 and Snapdragon 425 quad core-based phone.

With the right investment in PR/Marketing in Europe, we expect that the company can make some huge gains in many European counties - within and outside the EU. Good job lads.