After becoming the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, China’s Xiaomi is bullish about taking the top spot from Apple in five to 10 years.



Top Apple and Xiaomi executives traded blows under the veil of light-hearted barbs at China’s World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, where Xiaomi’s chief executive and founder Lei Jun described the company as a “small miracle” and said that it was setting its sights on world smartphone domination.

“I believe that no one thought the Xiaomi from three years ago, which just made its first phone, would later rank as the third largest player,” Lei said speaking for three minutes after arriving two hours late for a panel that was scheduled for two hours. “India is becoming our largest overseas market. Within five or 10 years, we have the opportunity to become the number one smartphone company in the world.”

‘A small miracle like Xiaomi’

Xiaomi was founded in 2010 and made its first smartphone in 2011 in China. It quickly became the number one smartphone manufacturer in China, rising to have 70 million users and becoming the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer in the third quarter of this year.

Lei said that the company is forecast to almost triple its user base in the next year to 200 million users and targets the number-one spot globally currently held by Samsung powered by Xiaomi’s expansion into new markets.

“It is easy to say, it is more difficult to do,” Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel and senior vice president of legal and government affairs, told the conference when asked about Lei’s bold claims which would require Xiaomi to displace Apple in second place, adding that there were “many good competitive phones in China”.

“In this magic land, we produced not only a company like Alibaba, but a small miracle like Xiaomi,” Lei said.

Mountain to climb

Xiaomi may be number one in China, where Apple languishes in sixth place, but on a global scale with 6% of the smartphone shipments in the third quarter, it is far behind Samsung’s 25% and Apple’s 12%.

Xiaomi’s smartphones use Google’s Android software with designs which some say mimic Apple’s iPhone. They compete with both Apple and Samsung smartphones with similar functionality, but at prices significantly lower than the cost of an iPhone 6 or Galaxy S5.

Moving from outside of China and select developing markets in south-east Asia and India may also be difficult for Xiaomi, potentially facing legal challenges from Apple. Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer, recently hit out at designs that could be seen as copying Apple.

“I’ll stand a little bit harsh, I don’t see it as flattery,” said Ive when asked about Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, described as “the Apple of China” in an interview with Vanity Fair. “When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is OK at all.”

Xiaomi has made efforts to be more appealing to the west, hiring key executives from Google, including the outspoken Brazilian vice president of Android Hugo Barra, who became Xiaomi’s head of international sales and spoke out about copycat claims.

“Our designers, our engineers, are inspired by great products and by great design out there. And frankly who in today’s world isn’t?” Barra said at the WSJD Live conference in Laguna Beach, California.

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