Sal McCloskey
Remember when Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun claimed his company would sell at least 80 million smartphones this year? Well, despite its explosive growth, the company wasn’t even able to achieve that number, and it was the lowest goal that it set for itself. Aside from the fact that Xiaomi hasn’t even released a flagship this year, the main reason for these lackluster sales is the fact that Huawei and Lenovo have been stepping up their game, and have become really competitive. Jun claims the company isn’t worried about its sales, but that sounds like an empty reassurance to me.
Today, Xiaomi’s chief executive Lei Jun downplayed the company’s failure to hit the 80 million smartphone sales he estimated they would sell in 2015. The prediction was made in March on the heels of an incredible 2014 sales year, and Xiaomi was still moving smartphones like hotcakes well into the second quarter of this year. Now, with only a few weeks left in 2015, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer is coming up short on their mark, and it looks like they aren’t going to hit it in time. What happened here? Xiaomi was rocking the smartphone market with innovative sales techniques and fiercely competitive prices. The five year old company sold 18.7 million devices in 2013, then exploded to 61.1 million sales in 2014. It would seem like 80 million in 2015 is a reasonable – even modest – projection for this year. They already sold 34.7 million devices by July 2015, so with Singles Day and holiday sales boosts, the figure seemed well within reach even just a few months ago. Where did they go wrong?
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