Xiaomi was founded in 2010 in Beijing by Lei Jun along with six associates. Lei had founded Kingsoft as well as Joyo.com, the latter of which he sold to Amazon for $75 million in 2004. In August 2011, Xiaomi released its first smartphone and, by 2014, it had the largest market share of smartphones sold in China. Initially the company only sold its products online; however, it later opened brick and mortar stores.[7] By 2015, it was developing a wide range of consumer electronics.[8] In 2020, the company sold 149.4 million smartphones and its MIUI (now Xiaomi HyperOS) mobile operating system has over 500 million monthly active users.[9] As of August 2024, Xiaomi is the second-largest seller of smartphones worldwide, with a market share of about 12%, according to Counterpoint.[10] It has come up with its own range of wearable items.[11] It also is a major manufacturer of appliances including televisions, flashlights, unmanned aerial vehicles, and air purifiers using its Internet of things and Xiaomi Smart Home product ecosystems.
Xiaomi keeps its prices close to its manufacturing costs and bill of materials costs by keeping most of its products in the market for 18 months, longer than most smartphone companies.[12][13] The company also uses inventory optimization and flash sales to keep its inventory low.[14][7] On 6 April 2010 Xiaomi was co-founded by Lei Jun and six others:
Lin Bin (林斌), vice president of the Google China Institute of Engineering
Zhou Guangping (周光平), senior director of the Motorola Beijing R&D center
Liu De (刘德), department chair of the Department of Industrial Design at the University of Science and Technology Beijing
Li Wanqiang (黎万强), general manager of Kingsoft Dictionary
Huang Jiangji (黄江吉), principal development manager
Hong Feng (洪峰), senior product manager for Google China
Lei had founded Kingsoft as well as Joyo.com, the latter of which he sold to Amazon for $75 million in 2004.[15] At the time of the founding of the company, Lei was dissatisfied with the products of other mobile phone manufacturers and thought he could make a better product.
On 16 August 2010, Xiaomi launched its first Android-based firmware MIUI (Now Xiaomi HyperOS).[16]
In 2010, the company raised $41 million in a Series A round.[17]
In August 2011, the company launched its first phone, the Xiaomi Mi 1. The device had Xiaomi's MIUI firmware along with Android installation.[15][18]
In December 2011, the company raised $90 million in a Series B round.[17]
In June 2012, the company raised $216 million of funding in a Series C round at a $4 billion valuation. Institutional investors participating in the first round of funding included Temasek Holdings, IDG Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Qualcomm.[15][19]
In August 2012, the Xiaomi user forum website suffered a data breach. In all, 7 million email addresses appeared in the breach although a significant portion of them were numeric aliases on the bbs_ml_as_uid.xiaomi.com domain. Usernames, IP addresses and passwords stored as salted MD5 hashes were also exposed.
In August 2013, the company hired Hugo Barra from Google, where he served as vice president of product management for the Android platform.[20][21][22][23] He was employed as vice president of Xiaomi to expand the company outside of mainland China, making Xiaomi the first company selling smartphones to poach a senior staffer from Google's Android team. He left the company in February 2017.[24]
In September 2013, Xiaomi announced its Xiaomi Mi 3 smartphone and an Android-based 47-inch 3D-capable Smart TV assembled by Sony TV manufacturer Wistron of Taiwan.[25][26]
In October 2013, it became the fifth-most-used smartphone brand in China.[27]
In 2013, Xiaomi sold 18.7 million smartphones.[28]