so you know when most companies they open a new store they kind of treat it like a massive deal well xiaomi in a single day opened not one not two but a thousand stores crazy company and seeing how fast they're expanding i think it's time we address them so these are my top 40 things about xiaomi from pretty cool to just ridiculous okay so the name show me you might think that given what they sell it's got something to do with gadgets but it actually translates to little rice which refers to a buddhist concept all about starting with very little and working your way up to the top and even their logo is a little bit more than it seems there's the obvious fact that it says me which is like a shorthand of xiaomi but it also legitimately stands for both mobile internet and i'm not even making this stuff up mission impossible it actually says that on their website and there's another layer flip this logo over and me becomes the chinese symbol for heart okay if i had to define xiaomi by just one characteristic it would be community focused you know oneplus has this whole attitude of treating their customers like fans well i think there's a pretty good chance that they got this from xiaomi like we're talking about a company who hosts quiz tournaments with their most loyal followers who host meetups everywhere from nepal to the united states who invited fans to the office for christmas in spain a company who went out and cleaned up after flooding in thailand alongside their me family i do actually remember the day that xiaomi came to the uk for the first time and they basically had their entire community just run around the cities wearing orange t-shirts could you ever imagine like samsung doing that probably not i will say though that a lot of this fan stuff it does occasionally tread the line into cringe territory like i watched this one video where they were reading out a poem that someone wrote to xiaomi you turn us on with your very best smartphone and i just can't but yeah for the most part they know how to connect with people and there's probably no better example of this than the me fan festival it's an online event where xiaomi basically launches a few new products they slap discounts across their existing products and they even create games for people to win things and you're going to want to take a seat for this one because in the last festival they did and just the chinese branch of it they managed to get 98 million people participating and i just can't for the life of me wrap my head around the scale of that figure 98 million people in one country in one day that said this is kind of xiaomi's main hurdle right now they're very china focused they have separate china only launch events like a good month before everyone else gets their phones many of their products they never even release in other countries and while it almost looks like xiaomi has their own religion in china but they've really struggled to cultivate that kind of fandom outside i mean just take lei jun who's the chairman of xiaomi he has around 60 000 followers on twitter the global platform how many do you think he has on the china only weibo 100 000 23 million but this is changing xiaomi has taken a lot of steps recently to to try and make itself a worldwide entity like how in 2013 they brought in hugo barrow a high-profile google employee to become vice president of xiaomi which it doesn't take a genius is also in part to just give them this western friendly image or how in 2017 xiaomi signed a collaboration deal with nokia such that both companies can use each other's patents and there's actually more to this whole nokia overlap you see xiaomi's cameras have been famously tailored to asian consumers the heavy beautification the skin smoothing the type of filters and even the ability to change the shape of your face these are things that the asian market really appreciates but at least from my experience the western market doesn't so much so to try and cater for international tastes xiaomi's actually set up a camera lab in finland in the exact same city where nokia's camera lab was presumably to hire employees who know what they're doing also internationally speaking xiaomi's always had a a bit of a pronunciation problem because i mean in most western languages we don't see words like this unless of course you're a viewer of this channel in which case a sub to the channel would be me miraculous nailed it but anyways the point i was making is that hugo barra he actually helped with this pronunciation problem so the way he described it to people was if you want to say xiaomi then try and say show me but say the show as if it was part of the word shower so shall me so with this more global mindset and with this whole hiring of more international employees within just 10 years xiaomi's gone from a band of eight guys in a room in china to now selling devices in 90 different countries it's honestly it's stupid levels of growth i couldn't believe this but they've actually knocked off apple to become the second biggest in spain and if you go to ukraine they're number one xiaomi is just generally killing it in eastern europe because i think it's just a market where people are less attached to samsung and apple and much more just in pursuit of value and even though xiaomi hasn't broken into the us yet there is promise like steve wozniak himself co-founder of apple is actually a bit of a xiaomi fan and he himself publicly said that xiaomi products are good enough to break the american market and that brings me to india when xiaomi first looked at india as a potential market it really did seem like a mission impossible like for starters nobody there had heard of them and there's also the fact that xiaomi's entire business model at the time was based on online sales but this market wasn't they did it though and within just six years they were not just trading blows with samsung for the absolute top position but they've also managed to dethrone just about every single local brand they provided better value rock bottom prices flash sales xiaomi even started manufacturing in india to save on shipping costs and i think the most interesting thing is xiaomi's attitude to profit you know how there's this common idea towards things you buy in a store that oh it's great but they probably made this for a fraction of the price well that doesn't really work in the android phone market especially for xiaomi who apparently only takes away about two dollars of profit per device sold that's in the uk at least about enough to buy half a sandwich obviously this still becomes a fairly substantial figure given the number of devices they sell but the way that xiaomi really gets its profits up is through software like how on more budget devices they bundle in adverts which you can turn off but just given the fact that they're on by default and the fact that they're shown literally every time you install an app or use a first party tool you can see how they make a lot of money for them and themes xiaomi actually invests a large sum in getting talented developers on board to make them and they even pay these developers before they've even done anything just so that they don't have to worry about making money and they can focus on being creative okay so xiaomi is spreading like wildfire and you would think that for growth this fast they must have started off with a bang they must have hit the ground running they must have launched with a phone so good that it blew people away not really when xiaomi started in 2010 they were an internet and software company they saw how android phones at the time lacked customization and looked kind of boring so their first product was actually not a phone but just a piece of software it was me ui and it actually took xiaomi a whole extra year after starting for them to come out with a phone that ran it do you want to know the most surprising thing though about xiaomi success it's the fact that it's not just been an incredibly short time frame but they've also managed to do this with just 20 000 full-time employees that might sound like a lot but huawei has almost 200 000 and xiaomi's main competitor right now samsung almost 300 000 and so the only way that this growth has been possible is because xiaomi doesn't waste time they specifically say on their website how they're against never-ending meetings and lengthy processes and there's also the ongoing debate as to whether they save time by also borrowing ideas we'll put it that way how their stores for example they look like carbon copies of apple stores the same color scheme the same product spacing to make each thing seem important even how they decorate their walls but the thing that i think has caused even more of a stir is the products themselves some of xiaomi's past products look so much like the apple counterparts that can it really be a coincidence like just compare the xiaomi mi 8 to the iphone 10 the me pad to the ipad or xiaomi's air dots versus apple's air pods but credit where do as well as the more dubious potentially cloned products xiaomi does also have a much wider selection than most of its competitors they have phones yes but also everything from a nose hair trimmer to an electric unicycle to a mattress to a robot vacuum cleaner which is funnily enough the one that i use and xiaomi is not afraid to test the limits they made the mix alpha with its wrap-around display they made a triple folding phone even though it never released they made a transparent tv which still makes no sense to me given that the only thing it's going to show is your cables going into your walls but i like the experimentation okay when you think of big tech companies there's a pretty good chance that you think of apple's colossal glass headquarters or huawei's sprawling european city-like workplace but it's actually really hard to find almost anything about xiaomi's hq they call it the technology park and from the bits that i have managed to piece together it does look fascinating there are slides to go downstairs there are people carting around on xiaomi built products it's just that as far as the english-speaking world is concerned it barely exists and this is also where their labs are they have more than 90 rooms here each built to make sure that their smartphones are all calibrated right that the cameras look good that the audio sounds correct they've even got a room here that can simulate every weather condition to make sure that the screens remain pleasant to look at in them but probably the coolest part of this hq is that xiaomi has a fake home here and the idea is that this is the kind of home that they are targeting their me devices at and so by having one here in their complex it means they cannot just use it to test things they're building to make sure they work in that home environment but this also serves as a way to inspire the next gadgets that they decide these homes can benefit from now just before my top three you might be wondering xiaomi's going global steve wozniak himself recommended them they're kind of like apple but cheaper why don't they have a presence in the united states well there's three prevailing theories one that they're waiting for u. s china relationships to improve before giving it a proper shot two that they'd kind of have to shift their entire business model of selling the phones on their own to actually working with carriers to try and sell contracts because that's how everyone in the us buys phones but also three that in the u. s patents are enforced strictly and so it is also possible that xiaomi is just hesitant because they don't want to get sued okay number three xiaomi has an official dog she was actually a stray who just so happened to end up outside their engineering headquarters as it was being built so they took her in she was apparently in pretty bad shape so they got her treated they cleaned her up and then actually gave her a company badge until one of the employees decided to just look after her full-time two xiaomi are terrible at naming their products techholter did a really good video about this but fundamentally they've created a whole lot of brands you got me you've got redmi you've got me note etc and it really feels like when they launch a new phone they just pick a random combination of one of these one number which half the time doesn't even match with the other phones at the series and then one of about 30 different ways of saying that it's either a light or a pro version and it's just a mess like the redmi note 9s is a higher end version of the redmi note 9 so oh right s must mean higher end no because the redmi 3s is a light version of a redmi 3.
they're almost as bad at naming things as elon musk then again am i really want to talk about naming i spelt my own username wrong right or did i i feel like this is going to be a 10 million subscriber special why i actually called the channel mr who's the boss and number one to try and improve their appearance globally xiaomi shortened their website url from xiaomi. com to me. com but that's not the surprising bit see the way it works with website domain names is that just like for custom number plates the more memorable and the shorter they are the more valuable they are and so for this incredibly simple domain name swap xiaomi paid 3.
