In a short period of time, the Chinese company Xiaomi has experienced tremendous growth. In fact, it was recently announced that it has become the company with the best smartphone sales in Europe, even surpassing Samsung. At the same time, the Chinese company’s presence in the US is minimal, with a website that does not even offer the product for which the brand is best known: the smartphone. To differentiate its products, Xiaomi divides them into several sub-brands, the most famous of which is “Mi”. Now, ten years after the launch of the first smartphone bearing the Mi brand, Xiaomi is ready to remove it from its next products. This change in branding already started with the MIX 4 smartphone . According to a company spokesperson, all upcoming products will follow the same logic.
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Although the company is best known for its smartphones, it also sells a wide range of products in the smart home, lifestyle, and computing categories (TVs, laptops, refrigerators, smartwatches, scooters, robots, hair dryers, and more). Most of these products carry the Mi brand, but it looks like that will change with new products being released.
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Say goodbye to Mi and hello to Xiaomi!
Xiaomi's first product to carry the Mi brand wasn't actually a smartphone, but it was smartphone-related. The company's first product was actually MIUI, a modified Android ROM created by the company. What many didn't realize at the time was that the developers behind MIUI had much bigger ambitions than just maintaining an Android fork.
In late 2011, Xiaomi released its first smartphone, the Mi 1. This smartphone had top-notch specifications (for that time) including Qualcomm's dual-core Snapdragon S3 chipset, 1 GB of RAM, etc. Of course, it also ran MIUI on top of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
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In the following years, Xiaomi continued to add new smartphones to its Mi series, which were exclusively available in China. In late 2013, the company expanded to other parts of Asia, including Singapore but most notably India, a country that has significantly contributed to Xiaomi's global success. Xiaomi's first products to be released outside of China were the Mi 3 and Redmi 2. The Redmi 2 was the second product in the company's Redmi sub-brand, which has since grown significantly.
The global launch of the Mi 3 and Redmi 2 helped Xiaomi expand into more markets. The company launched more smartphones and expanded into other product categories. In recent years, the Chinese company has been at the top of the list of companies with the highest smartphone sales. This was also helped by the decline of Huawei. In fact, the company's rapid rise is not surprising as Xiaomi makes really good products and is not afraid of competition.
Lei Jun, co-founder and CEO of Xiaomi, commented on the origin of the company’s name. “Mi,” he said, stands for two things: “Mobile Internet” and “Mission Impossible.” Xiaomi sees itself as a company that accomplishes “impossible” tasks. The word “Xiaomi” itself translates into English as “millet,” while “Xiao” translates to “small.” So Lei Jun linked the company’s name to the idea that a grain of rice to a Buddhist is as big as a mountain, which means the company focuses on the smaller things before moving on to the bigger things.
Now that Xiaomi is arguably the top smartphone brand in the world, the company probably believes that customers should now associate their products with the company name and not just “Mi.” It seems that in China, the company is already selling devices without “Mi” in the name.
Source: xda-developers
