Xiaomi

Xiaomi Corporation is a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Beijing, best known for its consumer electronics, software platforms and electric vehicles. The name, which means "millet" in Chinese, is also a pun on "Mobile Internet" and "mission impossible," a nod to the obstacles its founders set out to overcome. Often called the "Apple of China," Xiaomi is one of the youngest companies on the Fortune Global 500 and, as of 2025, ranks among the top three smartphone makers in the world behind Apple and Samsung. The company was founded in April 2010 by Lei Jun, a software entrepreneur who had been an executive at Kingsoft and co-founded Joyo.com (later sold to Amazon for $75 million), together with six co-founders including Lin Bin, a former engineering director at Google China. Their first product was not a phone but software: the MIUI Android skin, released in August 2010, which built a large community of early adopters before any hardware existed. In August 2011 Xiaomi launched its first smartphone, the Mi 1, priced far below comparable devices, and by 2014 it held the largest smartphone market share in China. Xiaomi's growth was fueled by an aggressive pricing model: the company kept hardware margins low, sold products online through flash sales, and reinvested in a rapidly expanding ecosystem of smart home and IoT devices. It went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2018 in a $4.7 billion IPO, one of the largest technology listings in Asia. The smartphone lineup is organized into several brands: the flagship Mi/Xiaomi series, the budget-to-mid-range Redmi line (whose Redmi Note series passed 300 million cumulative units in 2022), the value-focused POCO sub-brand launched in India in 2018, and the gaming-oriented Black Shark line. In 2021 the company also rebranded MIUI as the foundation for its own HyperOS operating system, which now spans phones, tablets, laptops and smart home devices. A significant part of Xiaomi's identity is its partnerships with premium brands. In 2022 it struck a strategic alliance with Leica to co-develop camera systems for its flagship phones, succeeding the Leica-Huawei collaboration, and with Harman Kardon on audio tuning. It has also invested in its own silicon, releasing the in-house XRING O1 3-nanometer processor in 2025, and expanded into artificial intelligence with the MiMo family of large language models. Beyond smartphones, Xiaomi has built one of the world's largest consumer IoT ecosystems, covering televisions, robot vacuums, air purifiers, wearables, scooters and thousands of third-party smart home accessories connected through its HyperOS platform. In 2021 it announced a ten-year, $10 billion investment in electric vehicles; its first model, the SU7 sedan, launched in March 2024, followed by the YU7 electric SUV in 2025, and the company set up its own manufacturing plant in Beijing. Xiaomi's rapid rise has not been without controversy. In 2021 it was briefly placed on a U.S. Department of Defense list of companies alleged to be linked to the People's Liberation Army, a designation that was later withdrawn after legal action; it has also faced patent disputes, privacy criticism, and continued scrutiny over its business in Russia. Even so, the company remains a global top-five smartphone vendor with hundreds of millions of monthly active users and a product portfolio that spans phones, vehicles and smart living.