Xiaomi has always loved numbers. The startup phone maker used to report with glee whenever it sold thousands or tens of thousands of phones in the space of a few minutes in its online flash sales. And every year the company would divulge its previous year’s sales figures as soon as the new year rolled in, before your festive hangover wore off.
But not any more.
This year, for the first time since Xiaomi launched a phone in late 2011, the company is not so keen to talk numbers. Its 2015 sales numbers have not been revealed and there’s nary a peep from CEO Lei Jun on his social media. “We currently have no numbers to share,” said a Xiaomi spokesperson this morning.
That’s quite a change of tune.
Off target
It may be because the company did not hit its 2015 target. In 2014, Xiaomi was China’s top-selling phone brand for the first time, dethroning Samsung. But 2015 was tougher as rivals studied and emulated Xiaomi’s success in the US$100 to US$400 smartphone market.
Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun said in February 2014 that he was looking to sell 100 million phones in 2015. By March last year, the boss revised the figure to 80 million.
Xiaomi worked with Ninebot (the new owner of Segway) to release this “hoverboard” in October.
Then Lei Jun changed his tune a few weeks ago. “Xiaomi does not emphasize goals such as smartphone sales anymore,” he said during an onstage interview at the World Internet Conference on December 17. “I want to get rid of traditional key performance indicators.”
If Xiaomi missed its 80 million target, it can’t have been by much. It sold 34.7 million smartphones in the first half of 2015.
Here’s all the full-year data it has revealed in the past:
The curse of numbers
The empire strikes back
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