Xiaomi India spins-off POCO into an independent brand

Xiaomi started off POCO as a sub-brand back in August 2018, with Xiaomi’s then Lead Product Manager Mr. Jai Mani at the helm of the brand. POCO had a very successful start with the POCO F1, which was launched in the same month in India as well as internationally. POCO’s beginnings echoed that of OnePlus, and the POCO F1 brought on board some of the same qualities that people had loved on the OnePlus One. Now, as was done with the Redmi brand, Xiaomi has announced that POCO will now operate as its own independent brand.

Excited to share: #POCO will now be an independent brand! What started as a sub-brand within Xiaomi, has grown into its own identity. POCO F1 was an incredibly popular phone. We feel the time is right to let POCO operate on its own. Join me in wishing @IndiaPOCO all the best. — Manu Kumar Jain (@manukumarjain) January 17, 2020

Xiaomi’s Vice President and Xiaomi India’s Managing Director Mr. Manu Kumar Jain took to Twitter to announce the new company structure for POCO. In a separate press release, Xiaomi India expanded on the same and mentioned that the new standalone brand will now run independent of Xiaomi, and will have its own team and go-to-market strategy.

Reacting to the change, POCO India’s official social media handles changed their display pictures to a black color image, with an Easter Egg hidden within. If you download the image and change the brightness and contrast, you can spot “HELLO WORLD!” written in the image.

POCO’s revival as an independent brand comes long after Mr. Jai Mani’s departure from the sub-brand and Xiaomi. With his exit, questions were repeatedly asked on whether we would ever see a POCO F2, a testimony to the immense popularity and practical utility of the re-imagined flagship killer. This spinoff clearly shows that the brand is not done yet, and that there will be more to come in the near future.

Curiously, a device named POCO X2 was spotted in the Geekbench database. Now, we know Geekbench benchmark listings can be very easily faked (because we proved the same with the fake POCO F1 Lite listing), and hence, we don’t trust them as reliable sources of information. That still stands true, but this new announcement from Xiaomi ends up providing a small shred of corroboration to the Geekbench listing — mainly that the brand is not dead yet. The “POCO X2” showed up with the device codename as phoenixin. which is the Indian variant of phoenix, which in turn is the device codename for the Redmi K30 4G. This makes little sense — for one, the Redmi K-series already exists in India, so everyone naturally expects a successor to the Redmi K20 and Redmi K20 Pro to be launched in India. Secondly, POCO is spun off into an independent brand, so the POCO X2 (which would essentially be a rebranded Redmi K30 4G) would essentially go against such independence. So our advice is to continue taking Geekbench listings with a pinch of salt, until further corroborations.