Two Xiaomi phones crack top 10 rankings for global smartphone sales in February: report

Xiaomi, China’s golden boy smartphone maker, is rolling with the big dogs – according to a study from Hong Kong-based Counterpoint Technology Market Research, two of the company’s devices ranked among the top 10 most-sold smartphones around the world for the month of February 2014.

Xiaomi’s mid-range Redmi sits at number seven on Counterpoint’s rankings, wedged in between Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Mini and the Galaxy S3. Its high-end Mi3 meanwhile, caps the rankings at number 10.

Counterpoint devised the list by tapping into its channel partners and measuring sales – meaning, devices sold as final goods from retailers to end-users.

These horse race-esque reports and rankings can get silly at times, as sales and shipment figures don’t necessarily reflect the health of each manufacturer’s revenues. Still, we think this release from Counterpoint deserves some attention. In this study for global smartphone sales, only three brands crack the top ten – Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. Of those three brands, only Xiaomi can claim to be a largely ‘local’ brand. Despite moving into Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore over the past six months, the majority of its sales remain in mainland China.

Xiaomi recently revealed it shipped 11 million devices during the first quarter of 2014 – more than half the number of devices it sold during the entire 2013 calendar year. It set its sales target for this year at 60 million devices.

(Source: Counterpoint Research)

Editing by Steven Millward