Smartphone nerds are universally familiar with the name Xiaomi, though few in the U.S. have ever held one of its phones. The brand is explosively popular in many other countries in the world, most recently experiencing growth in India and Spain, but you can't buy a single Redmi or Mi Mix phone from an American retailer yet.

After the recent and spectacular failures of Huawei and ZTE in the U.S., it's not difficult to understand why the company is cautiously planning its Stateside launch strategy. But even in the face of those events, Xiaomi remains convinced it will start selling hardware to Americans within the next year or so. To make this work, its plan is to sit back and learn as much as it can about this new market and then approach it like the giant it is.

When sitting down with Xiaomi at Google I/O 2018, just after Google announced the Android P developer preview was coming to the Mi Mix 2S, we asked John Chan, Product PR Manager at Xiaomi, about the future of the company's U.S. plans — and we were as blunt as possible. The answer wasn't particularly surprising, either.

Our path [to the U.S.] is getting into the carriers. Traditionally, the only brand with some kind of success outside of carriers in the U.S. is OnePlus, and it's still catered to a very small market of users. People who do their research and have heard of it. We want to bring in our full range, even the Redmi series. We just have to figure out how to get in with U.S. carriers.

Xiaomi doesn't want to compete with Motorola or OnePlus or HTC — it wants to compete directly with Apple and Samsung. That works two ways here: you either spend a lot of money on advertising everywhere, or you exist on shelves next to the iPhone and Galaxy phones.

Xiaomi wants to be next to devices like the Galaxy S9 and iPhone X on store shelves in the U.S. And that's really, really hard.

Spending money on advertising largely goes against the Xiaomi business model. It has publicly vowed, on multiple occasions, to never make more than 5% profit on any device it sells, which means marketing budgets are never going to be massive.

Instead, the company wants its phones to be in stores where people can touch them. The logic here is simple: when someone sees a phone that looks and feels as nice as a Galaxy S9 but is several hundred dollars cheaper, they're going to ask about it. That only happens when you're on the shelf next to these other manufacturers.