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How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

This article is more than 10 years old.

Xiaomi, the hot smartphone maker from China which recently overtook Apple in marketshare there, wants to do for hardware what developers do to software: change it. All the time.

It's part of the unique way that Xiaomi operates, closely analyzing the user feedback it gets on its smartphones and following the suggestions it likes for the next batch of 100,000 phones. It releases them every Tuesday at noon Beijing time.

"Every batch is incrementally better," said Hugo Barra, the ex-Google product executive who jumped over to Xiaomi in August in what looked like a role to help the company expand internationally.

Barra was speaking on stage at the GMIC mobile conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, alongside Xiaomi's billionaire founder Lei Jun. Just across the street at the Moscone Center North, Apple was releasing a new range of iPads, last updated in November 2012.

Barra, who had his own experience at Google to compare to, said Xiaomi's obsessive and rapidly-executed focus on user feedback was "not something you see often in this landscape." He revealed that product managers at the company can spend half their time perusing the company's active user forums.

"[A] suggestion gets picked up by a product manager within hours. Within a few [more] hours it can be at an engineer's desk." If they think it's a good idea, the suggestion can go in the next weekly build. "A number of unique features we've built are user suggestions. Things that came out of someone's head rather than product mangers." Xiaomi calls its end users "me fans."

While this crowd-sourced approach to developing a product is the complete antithesis to Apple's secretive, top-down approach, Xiaomi gets called the Apple of China on a regular basis. "What we are trying to accomplish is very different to what Apple is trying to achieve," said Jun, who spoke through a translator.

Another key difference was cost. "We're trying to create greater products while selling a product that is close to the manufacturing price," he said.

Xiaomi's Lei Jun; image via CrunchBase

Undercutting the iPhone has helped Xiaomi gain more than 5% smartphone marketshare in China, overtaking Apple's 4.8%. While iPhones cost around $900 in the country, Xiaomi's cheapest phone costs around $300. Xiaomi's valuation of $10 billion has also helped boost Jun's net worth to $3.5 billion, and in September the three-year old company said it had finally become profitable. It is reportedly on track to triple handset sales this year.

Barra, who Jun said was the first "truly international person" to join Xiaomi, said he'd been tracking the company for the last two years while at Google. Xiaomi had a "quirky" culture, which might make it harder to find talented individuals it can hire as it expands internationally, but its focus on users reminded Barra of Google's "Don't be evil" ethos.

Jun talked up the company's 100% compatibility with Google's Android operating system, hinting that he had no plans to launch his own software platform; its phones have a customized user interface built on top of Android.

Neither executive would say which country Xiaomi wants to expand to first, though Jun said it had been testing the waters in Taiwan. The market would need a populace that's active on social media and have a strong e-commerce infrastructure, he added. While the  U.S. fits that bill pretty well, international smartphone makers have found it a challenge to grab market share and profits here from Samsung and Apple. Just ask Nokia and HTC.

"We haven't decided which markets we're going to enter yet," said Barra. "We'll focus on end users from day one."

Wherever it goes first, Xiaomi will carry out a very different strategy to other device makers, by customizing products for different markets, Jun said. And if you had to compare it to another big tech company, it wouldn't be Apple but Amazon. "We are using hardware to build a software platform he said. "We sell all our products online."

It's of course harder to iterate products on a weekly basis when you're crossing national borders and time zones. Xiaomi, though, seems intent on eventually breaking out of China, and the thought of that almost certainly makes Apple and Samsung nervous.

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