Who’s the guy replacing Hugo Barra at Xiaomi?

Image montage by Tech in Asia. Photo credit: Xiaomi.

Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s big hire from Google, earlier this afternoon announced his departure from the Chinese gadget maker. He’s leaving a high-profile and important role at Xiaomi as it looks towards India and other new markets for growth to compensate for plummeting phone sales in China.

Wang Xiang, Xiaomi’s senior vice president, is Barra’s replacement heading up the brand’s global efforts.

His name is an unfamiliar one – even in China, let alone overseas.

Hugo boss: The former Google exec meets a young Xiaomi fan onstage. Photo credit: Hugo Barra’s Facebook.

Wang, a fluent English speaker, is the former Qualcomm China president. He was poached by Xiaomi mid-2015, when the startup’s founder and CEO, Lei Jun, described him as someone with “excellent leadership skills, over 20 years of experience in the industry, and close ties with players within the mobile ecosystem.”

The electronic engineer worked at Qualcomm for 13 years. His CV includes a brief spell at Motorola.

Wang Xiang at a Xiaomi meetup in Russia last year. Screenshot from Xiaomi video.

Wang hasn’t posted to Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, for over six months, and he has no presence on either Facebook or Twitter. That’s at odds with Xiaomi’s community-oriented approach to its fans and to marketing its products, which often relies on communicating via social media. They were doing it long before President Trump.

Hugo Barra has over 108,000 Facebook followers – where he posted his news today – as well as 100,000 on Twitter. However, having a strong social media presence may not be consequential to the success of the role that Wang now fills.

“We have ambitious expansion plans for 2017 and are confident in Xiang’s leadership to take our global business to even greater heights!” said Lin Bin, Xiaomi co-founder and president, in an announcement today on Facebook.