Xiaomi now the world's most valuable tech startup

[Himanshu Arora]

China's top smartphone vendor Xiaomi, which recently surpassed LG and Lenovo to become the third-largest smartphone maker in the world, has announced that it has raised $1.1 billion in its latest funding round valuing the company at a whopping $45 billion, pre-money.

With this, the four-year-old company, which is often referred to as the ‘Apple of China’, has become the world’s most valuable technology startup, surpassing all other startups including ride-sharing service Uber, which recently raised $1.2 billion at a total valuation of around $41 billion.

"We will strive to continue bringing innovation to everyone, with a goal of producing high-quality, high-performance devices with great user experience," said Xiaomi co-founder and president Bin Lin in a Facebook post, adding that the company will unveil its next flagship device in January 2015.

Some of the investors who participated in this round of funding include All-Stars Investment, DST, GIC, Hopu Fund, and Yunfeng Capital.

Founded in 2010, Xiaomi quickly rose to success thanks to its competitive prices, focus on its own mobile software known as MIUI, as well as targeted marketing. However, despite the phenomenal growth, the company still lags far behind the likes of Samsung and Apple in terms of revenue and profits -- a recent financial report showed Xiaomi made just 347.48 million yuan ($56.15 million) of profit on 26.58 billion yuan ($4.30 billion) in revenue last year, compared to Apple, which made around $25.4 billion (nearly six times) in revenue in Greater China during the same period.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/59262-xiaomi-now-world-most-valuable-tech-startup.html

 

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"a recent financial report showed Xiaomi made just 347.48 million yuan ($56.15 million) of profit on 26.58 billion yuan ($4.30 billion) in revenue last year, compared to Apple, which made around $25.4 billion (nearly six times) in revenue in Greater China during the same period."

Xiaomi is trying to a get a smartphone in everyone's hand. Whereas Apple is trying to profit from every device sold.

Between the Redmi 1S and the iPhone 6 the specs are practically identical save from the OS. Now here's the game changer. Currently the iPhone 6 sells for around $830 (52,500 Rs) compared to the Redmi 1S which sells for a measly $95 (5,999 Rs).

Of course Xiaomi isn't churning out huge numbers, they also aren't charging their customers out the *** for a phone.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

The Chinese smartphone invasion is coming and to be honest, I'm quite happy about it. If they carry on producing quality phones at excellent prices I wouldn't hesitate to grab one.

 

[p51d007]

I don't have an xiaomi, but I do have a Huawei Ascend Mate2. Not "flagship" by any means, but it's fast, with no lag, has an incredible battery life and has been with zero issues. I put it side by side with a Nexus 6, setting both screens to the same brightness level, and running the same applications, it runs as fast in REAL WORLD usage as the Nexus 6. Then why would I want to spend more than twice the price, just to get something that has hardware the software can't really take advantage of? So the software might be a few versions off...IT WORKS. The Apples, Samsungs & Motorolas of the world better be careful. If the Chinese devices, can retain quality & performance, with super low prices, a lot of them will be hurting in the next couple years.

 

[Puiu]

I have a Xiaomi Redmi and for it's money it works 10 times better than western competitors.

 

[Guest]

Between the Redmi 1S and the iPhone 6 the specs are practically identical

CPU Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A7
GPU Adreno 305

(Quoted from GSM Arena)
So, to be fair, the Redmi 1S is a LOT slower. The Apple A8 SoC used on the iPhone outperforms the Snapdragon 801 (four Cortex A15-based cores at over 2 GHz) and sits a bit behind the Snapdragon 805 (also four A15-based cores). And that's not considering the fact that the Apple A8 only has two cores, so we're talking about much higher single-thread performance than the 800 series.
Now, you're comparing the A8 to a much smaller, and lower-clocked, Cortex A7-based chip. There is no contest here.

 

[Guest]

I have Xiaomi pistons v2 earphones, price is only $20. The quality of this product exceeds the price. Quality earphones, not the best, but its bang for the buck.

 

[JakeT]

If Japan would have produced cell phones in the early 60s, they would have been crap, like their cars were at the start. Now Japan has a reputation of building quality products such as cars, photo equipment, etc. China will one day arrive at this point and if their products stay competitive (very low) in price, they will become the powerhouse that western companies want to become but can't because of the higher cost of technology and labour.
Apple will have no choice but to sell their products at realistic prices, but then who will want an Apple product if it doesn't give you the impression that you're buying an ingot of gold to show off to your friends.
/speculation off

 

[bexwhitt]

The apple like MIUI is a determent to an android phone IMOP that said I don't like a dumbed down OS like this or OSX

 

[Guest]

China will one day arrive at this point and if their products stay competitive (very low) in price, they will become the powerhouse that western companies want to become but can't because of the higher cost of technology and labour.
Apple will have no choice but to sell their products at realistic prices, but then who will want an Apple product if it doesn't give you the impression that you're buying an ingot of gold to show off to your friends.

A brilliant example of how most tech forum users have absolutely no clue that the value of a product goes much beyond the meaningless numbers on its technical specs sheet, as well as what things like "build quality", "emotional appeal", "brand recognition" and "social status" mean.
You're talking about the country that wants eight-core processors on phones, where the vast majority of apps make use of two threads at most, and 75% of that processor is literally a waste of TDP. Meanwhile, Apple makes a wide ARMv8-based dual-core chip that runs circles around any Snapdragon in single-thread performance, and is only slower than the Snapdragon 805 in multi-threaded performance (although the 805 has a 50% higher TDP to achieve that), and all we heard is "LOL, iPhones still have dual-cores, get back to me when it has four cores like us."
Apple will be fine. And so will Motorola, for example. Those are companies that, unlike yourself and most of this forum, know that the solution isn't bigger numbers to attract more gullible customers.

 

[erickmendes]

Between the Redmi 1S and the iPhone 6 the specs are practically identical

CPU Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A7
GPU Adreno 305

(Quoted from GSM Arena)
So, to be fair, the Redmi 1S is a LOT slower. The Apple A8 SoC used on the iPhone outperforms the Snapdragon 801 (four Cortex A15-based cores at over 2 GHz) and sits a bit behind the Snapdragon 805 (also four A15-based cores). And that's not considering the fact that the Apple A8 only has two cores, so we're talking about much higher single-thread performance than the 800 series.
Now, you're comparing the A8 to a much smaller, and lower-clocked, Cortex A7-based chip. There is no contest here.

A LOT of people prefers the Performance/$ ratio over the pure performance numbers... And in the end of the day the chinese phones can run facebook, skype, gmail, take pictures, all the common apps as good as those fancy flagship western brands.
Those high end SoCs will only really matter in the tablet arena, even there, there's still plenty of market share that want a tablet just for web browsing, social apps, where there once again, absolute compute power can lose for performance/$...