Xiaomi wants to focus on high-end smartphones and compete better with Apple

Xiaomi’s founder and CEO Lei Jun wants his company to focus more on high-end premium smartphones. The company sees this as the only way to grow and wants to compete more directly with Apple.

Lei sees the high-end smartphones as ‘a struggle to the death’, he writes on Weibo. According to the South China Morning Post, Xiaomi wants to compete directly with Apple when it comes to products and “experiences”. Only by winning this battle, Xiaomi thinks it can continue to grow. Lei does not yet give concrete examples of how Xiaomi should do this.

The Chinese smartphone maker said last August that it wants to become the largest smartphone manufacturer worldwide in three years. To achieve that, the company wants to focus on the high-end smartphones and compete more with Apple. The latter delivered the most smartphones worldwide in the last quarter of 2021, research firm Canalys said last month. Then Samsung followed, with Xiaomi in third place. With 45.4 million smartphones, Xiaomi delivered almost half of what Apple delivered, which made 82.7 million deliveries.

If you look at the whole year, Samsung is still the market leader, followed by Apple and Xiaomi. According to these figures, Samsung has a 20 percent market share, Apple 17 percent and Xiaomi 14 percent. Xiaomi saw the largest growth of these three in 2021.