Do you remember when we said Xiaomi was the second top phone brand in the world? Well, now they are the top phone brand in the world? According to various analytics companies, including Counterpoint, the Chinese phone market surpassed the global giants Samsung and Apple to become the number smartphone brand in June after their sales went up by 26%.
Ever since the decline of Huawei commenced, Xiaomi has been making consistent and aggressive efforts to fill the gap created by its decline. The OEM has been expanding in Huawei’s and HONOR’s legacy markets like China, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
In June, Xiaomi was futher helped by China, Europe and India’s recovery and Samsung’s decline due to supply constraints.
Xiaomi was the fastest growing OEM, riding on its aggressive offline exansion in lower-tier citiies and solid performance of it’s Redmi 9, Redmi Note 9 and the Redmi K series.
Tarun Pathak Research Director at Counter Point.
The company decides to drop the Mi branding
The last time we heard about Xiaomi rebranding they spend an inordinate amount of money on a new logo that looked not so different from their old one. They spent a whopping US$300 000 to move from a logo with square corners to a logo with rounded corners.
Now Xiaomi is about to engage in another strange rebranding exercise that’s going to confuse a lot of their existing customers. They will no longer be using the “Mi” brand alongside their products. For example, in the past, we had phones like the Mi Mix 2 and Mi Mix 3. Instead of the Mi Mix 4, we are getting just the Mix 4 the Mi part will no longer appear in marketing campaigns or in the official naming schemes.
The rebranding is not just for the phones but for the entire Xiaomi product line up including smart TVs, fitness bands, laptops, smartwatches and other smart (IoT) products that Xiaomi makes. The company has a very extensive line up including an air fryer so the rebranding exercise is going to cost them a pretty penny and take a while to filter down.
Their extensive lineup kind of reminds me of Toyota and Mercedes Benz and their mind-bending car model lineups. I am also reminded of Samsung and its many many gadgets-they have fingers in all sorts of pies. When companies are that big and make so many products branding them can be a difficult and expensive exercise.
