Xiaomi: China’s big Apple rival isn’t worth getting excited about (yet)

Xiaomi, the third-largest smartphone maker in the world, is coming stateside, but not in the way pundits expected.

The company announced at a conference Thursday that its e-commerce website, Mi.com, could start selling products to U.S. customers in five months. Surprisingly, smartphones will not be among them — at least, at first.

Instead, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s Global VP, suggested the company might start with items such as a recently-launched pair of headphones and its popular external battery pack, the latter of which sold 15 million units in 2014. The company has no immediate plans for bringing its handsets to the U.S., he added.

“We might try things in small volumes and see how it goes,” Barra told Mashable. The former Google VP, who managed Android development before joining Xiaomi in 2013, said the Chinese company might also use social media polls to see which products might sell well stateside. “We’ll actually gain a lot of experience from selling these products here because we’ll get a lot of feedback that will actually be globally relevant for us.”…..read on

Adapted from Mashable

 

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