2014 has indeed been a phenomenal year for China's top smartphone vendor Xiaomi when it tripled its smartphone sales having sold more than 61 million phones, according to the company's CEO Lei Jun.
Moreover, the exceptional figure of their smartphones' sales added in kicking in their revenue up to more than $12 billion in 2014.
This year alone, the Chinese tech giant rose as China's top smartphone manufacturer and by the 3rd quarter of 2014, it became the world's top 3 smartphone maker. Such great feats both accomplished in a matter of only one year! Of course it did not come as a walk in the park for the said company. It had its shares of ups and downs.
There was the rumor of being a "copycat" to Apple, the let down of its Big Billion Day Sale when Flipkart servers crashed because of the huge influx of online buyers, the Redmi 1S security concerns that caused the Indian Air Force to warn their colleagues and families to refrain from using Xiaomi's mobile devices, and recently, the patent issues with Swedish network equipment vendor Ericsson, which has disrupted Xiaomi's international expansion, particularly in India, where all its products, particularly the Redmi 1S, are selling like hotcakes.
But then they also have their feats such as their numerous flash sales in India which catapulted their Redmi 1S product as their top seller device as it was always out of stock in a matter of seconds! It was also an admirable trait for the company to be very transparent as they have always addressed the issues they were involved in.
To date, Xiaomi is now valued at $45 billion, as a result of the $1.1 billion funding round with investors namely Milner's DST, All-Stars Investment Ltd., and Singapore's GIC Pte. CEO Lei mentioned that Xiaomi is now the "highest valued IT firm yet to go public."
