Leading Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is aiming for a future as an
Internet company with the potential to cross swords with titans such as
Alibaba.
Xiaomi co-founder and chief executive Lin Bin on Wednesday
shared a vision of a future that includes Segway-like self-balancing
scooters and smartphones and a role for the company in e-commerce,
digital movies and games.
"We'd rather be called an Internet
company," Lin said during an on-stage interview at the WSJD Live
technology conference on the Southern California coast.
"We are really focusing on building out smartphones as the center of all these smart devices that are launched."
Xiaomi
smartphones can be used to control the company's recently introduced
Ninebot mini scooter. China-based Ninebot, owned by Xiaomi, bought US
rival Segway early this year.
The Xiaomi handsets can also be used to remotely control a new Mi TV model, according to Lin.
"We think of the TV as yet another smart device," Lin said. "It is almost like a phone except it is a much bigger display."
The
path ahead for Xiaomi includes providing online services and digital
content, like games, rather than just selling televisions or
smartphones, according to Lin.
While most of Xiaomi's revenue now
comes from hardware sales, he predicted that would shift as Xiaomi gets
deeper into online services, content, e-commerce, and even financial
services.
That vision would have Xiaomi challenging Chinese e-commerce colossus Alibaba.
"On the hardware side, we think we have advantages over Alibaba," Lin said.
Xiaomi
tailors free Google-backed Android software to power devices. Getting
Xiaomi smartphones in people's hands provides opportunity to have
software easily connect people to the startup's online offerings.
Apple,
a winning model when it comes to combining the power of mobile device
hardware and software, is already a thriving rival to Xiaomi in the
premium smartphone market in China.
Lin brushed aside a suggestion that Xiaomi copied features from iPhones.
"For every single tiny similarity between us and Apple, I can probably point out a hundred differences," Lin said
The
Chinese smartphone market is shifting to a flat, if not declining,
upgrade scenario after boom years of people snapping up their first
handsets, according to Lin.
He said that Xiaomi is doing well in
India, and has sold more than three million smartphones there since
expanding to that country last year.
In just five years, the
Chinese firm has become the world's number three smartphone vendor,
behind only Apple and South Korea's Samsung, with rapid growth in
emerging countries.
It has yet to introduce its handsets to the US
market but it has opened an online accessory store in the United States
and major European countries, selling fitness bands headphones and
other gadgets.
Alibaba Qwen 2.5 Omni AI Model With Real-Time Speech Generation Released27 March 2025
Search
![Gadgets 360 With Technical Guruji: Ask TG [ March 22, 2025]](https://c.ndtvimg.com/2024-12/5s52e4k_-ask-tg_640x480_14_December_24.jpg?downsize=180:*)
