Xiaomi Uprising
In the world of technology, certain companies made a name for themselves, by innovating and bringing products to the market that really suits the need of the costumers, some companies succeeded in doing so while others failed miserably.
If you look at a certain sector of the technology world, as you probably can’t look at it from a general overview especially with the number of products that are being developed every day, like for example in the world of gaming, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft takes the lead, in the world of PC’s and laptops, Apple, Lenovo and Dell takes the lead, and in the world of cameras Nikon, Canon and Sony takes the lead, so it’s very hard to look at technology from a general overview because in every sector of it there are companies that takes the lead, of course the credit most of the times go to the good products that they produce and the decisions that they make.
One of the things that we know about our world is that nothing stays at the top for long, and somethings don’t stay the same forever, as time goes by, people change and so their certain needs and thoughts, like for example, the chatting apps wasn’t around like 30 years ago, and people lived happily, they didn’t need something like the chat apps, but when they were founded, it made people’s lives a lot easier, so the times changes frequently. The reason why I’m saying that, because in the world of smartphones, we had a lot of changes over the years, despite the fact that it’s relatively a young sector or market. Unlike Cameras, PC’s or other electronics like refrigerators or washing machines, the smartphone market wasn’t founded until the late 90s so it’s considered a young market, and also despite that, the changes that went with the smartphone market over the years are considered more than the changes that went with the refrigerators, or washing machines, maybe the biggest reason for that, is the evolution of the mobile, to a device that can do all sort of stuffs called a smartphone, I mean right now if you own a smartphone, you don’t perhaps need a laptop to read your emails and review your documents, you don’t need a camera to shoot images and videos of your favorite events, you don’t need an MP3 player to listen to music, you don’t need a TV to watch your favorite shows, it’s really a magnificent invention.
The smartphone right now can almost do everything, that’s why you can say that people right now live inside their phones, or maybe their whole life is inside their phones, although that’s a bad thing, but we are going to talk about it in another time.
As I said before every sector in the technology market has a company that holds the lead, and with the smartphone market being still young, this market has had a lot of changes in the lead since its very beginning, do you remember Nokia? Well who doesn’t (actually the Nokia Brand came back again after being bought by a Chinese company called HMD, and the company produces smartphones that are powered with Android rather than Windows Phone OS which was discontinued years ago), but with Nokia holding the lead for years in the smartphone market, it wasn’t always like this, since the beginning of this market a lot of companies has had the lead, for starters, Motorola was the leading company at first, and the reason for that, that they did create the first mobile phone, and with other products followed it, they held the first position in the market. There is also Siemens which they didn’t hold the lead but they were on the first 5 companies on the list. And then after that came Nokia, for starters Nokia wasn’t a mobile phone manufacture company at first, as they were in a lot of business’s (cable, paper products, rubber boots, tires), after that they switched to the mobile phone market, and they did pretty good, to the point that Nokia held the lead for like many years in the smartphone market, with different mobile phones produced and with phones that suits the need of every costumer like the Nseries for the people who consumes a lot of multimedia, the Eseries for the Enterprise-class and business people and the famous Xpress Music which was the smartphone that was produced with music listening orientation.
Nokia did pretty good, they weren’t the company that produced the first 3G smartphone, although the Nokia 6630 was a good competitor, they weren’t the first to produce a slate smartphone with a touch display, in fact they were one of the last companies to go all touch display, but the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music was one of their best smartphones, going head to head with the first iPhone.
One of the companies that held the first positions on the lead is BlackBerry also one of the last manufactures to ditch the QWERTY Keyboard and go all Touch display, and they were one of the best companies to produce hand held communicators smartphones, which were the smartphones that suits the business people more.
After that we reached the era of Android, in fact Android has been here for a longer time since the first iPhone, which was still the prime time of Nokia, but of course we all know the company that held the lead on the market after Android got popular, and that company was Samsung.
To this day Samsung holds the lead on the first 5 positions, which it got overthrown recently by Xiaomi which we’ll talk about it later, but Samsung had a strategy which seemed that it had a lot of potential to successes, which still used to this day, and the strategy is to produce a wide variety of products that’s suits almost all type of costumers and with prices that can go as low as $150, which could be really accessible to a lot of costumers.
This strategy seemed to a lot of costumers as if Samsung is making a lot of cheap smartphones, and maybe that is true, but if you give it a second thought, this actually suits a lot of costumers, as if you’re a person who is in budget, you can find the phone that suits your needs, I still remember phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fit, Ace Mini, Mini 2, Ace Plus, Ace 2, Young and young 2 which were a small number of a huge portion of phones that suits a lot of costumers taste. If you were at extreme budget the mini was for you, if you can pay more the Galaxy Fit is for you, if you want even a better device you can go for the Ace 2, and of course you can go to the flagships, the S and Note Series.
This budget was so good that it’s the same budget that has been used to overthrow Samsung itself, by none other than Huawei. At the recent years Huawei was at the center of attention and it was because of the problems between the American government from one side and the Chinese government and Huawei Company from another, and it was all because the allegations that the American government presented against Huawei, at which they claimed that Huawei used it’s equipment with the help of the Chinese government to spy on the American people, of course the US didn’t present any proof to support these acquisitions and they punished the company with sanctions which hurt them a lot and made them lose the market.
Huawei refined the strategy that was used by Samsung at first, and it was by producing devices that suits the needs of the costumers but at a cheaper price than Samsung devices but with even better specs, which made them get the lead of the market fast, and what helped with that is that the labor in China is much cheaper than in any other place. Then
What about Xiaomi?
When I was thinking about writing this article the best name that I’ve come up with is Xiaomi Uprising, because it really is an uprising.
Xiaomi really followed with the same strategy that Huawei was implementing, and that is producing wide range of phones for every costumer taste with even more cheaper prices than Samsung or even Huawei, at the time of their prime.
One of the phones that I still admire to this day, is the Pocophone F1 which was an amazing smartphone at a super cheap price, with specs that includes Snapdragon 845, FHD display, 6 or 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of internal storage, infrared face recognition, 4000mAH with 18W fast charging this phone was a flagship killer, killer, in fact with this phone Xiaomi invented the term Flagship Killer, Killer, which was a phone that has all the flagship specs that compete with regular flagships that can be even more cheaper than a smartphone that is known as a flagship killer, which was the term that was presented for the first time by OnePlus, the Pocophone F3 was at a reasonable $300 price, which was really cheap.
So what happened is that Xiaomi is the company that benefited the most from the Huawei ban, it was like Huawei was like blocking their uprising, and with the ban from the United States, Xiaomi found it as a good opportunity for them to soot for the lead, even with Samsung got on the top again with the Huawei ban, and with their wide variety of smartphones (the same strategy that everyone was now implementing), it didn’t stop Xiaomi for acquiring the top smartphone shipments this year.