These 10 ingredients are the recipe to Xiaomi’s secret sauce

Xiaomi can boast of some remarkable milestones in just its third full year as a gadget maker. The Chinese startup is on course to sell 60 million smartphones this year, and it has made some sure-footed (if rather slow) steps into a number of markets in Asia, such as Indonesia and India.

The company’s growth is more remarkable when you see how it does so many things very differently from more established phone brands. But the case may be that those quirks are Xiaomi’s secrets to success.

A recent social branding report on Xiaomi produced by Resonance China picks apart a large variety of the startup’s strategies and shows how they’re working out quite nicely. The beauty of these is that Xiaomi can export them all to its new markets – even into challenging emerging nations across Southeast Asia or, eventually, Latin America.

We’ve condensed Xiaomi’s business strategies into these 10 ninja moves:

1. Xiaomi is basically an ecommerce company

Serial entrepreneur and Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun likes to say that his newest startup is an ecommerce company – which is one of many reasons he dislikes the frequent comparisons between Xiaomi and Apple. He thinks that likening it to Amazon is closer to the mark. Xiaomi has its own estore and also has a storefront on Alibaba’s Tmall.

The numbers back up Lei Jun’s claim. Xiaomi’s website is the third largest business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce store in China in terms of sales volume (behind Tmall and closest rival JD). On China’s Singles Day on November 11, a sales bonanza that saw US$9.3 billion spent on Tmall, Xiaomi was the top brand on Alibaba’s marketplace. Xiaomi sold 1.2 million phones during the 24-hour sales event, racking up, along with sales of some other gadgets, RMB 1.56 billion (US$254 million) in items sold.

Xiaomi generally only sells its devices in limited flash sales – typically in batches of about 50,000 to 100,000 in China, but in smaller amounts overseas – so as to ensure it only manufactures what it’s sure to sell.

The upstart company’s sales pitch doesn’t stop once someone has bought a smartphone. New customers will find that their phone comes with a Xiaomi store app pre-installed.

2. Homepage is an estore

That online commerce focus finds its apotheosis in the Xiaomi.com website. Most gadget brands use their homepages as showrooms or glorified online adverts. Xiaomi, however, cuts to the chase by making its home on the web into a pure ecommerce store.

Xiaomi’s web home updates daily to put an emphasis on which products are next available in its ongoing flash sales.

“Xiaomi’s product pages mimic best practices from Tmall,” says Rand Han, the founder and managing director of Resonance China. Tmall is China’s biggest brand-oriented online marketplace, with tens of thousands of vendors such as Uniqlo, Costco, and Burberry. That makes Xiaomi’s website layout familiar to the hundreds of millions of shoppers on Tmall and other popular ecommerce sites in China, with the usual tabs to switch between images, specifications, and buyers’ reviews and ratings.