If you’re anxiously awaiting Xiaomi’s sales figures as the year comes to a close, Lei Jun will happily tease you. This morning, the CEO sent out a post on Weibo claiming that device shipments to Xiaomi’s warehouse increased 20 percent from the second to third quarter of this year.
Xiaomi tells Tech in Asia that “device shipments” refers to assembled smartphones sent to the company’s warehouses in Beijing. For traditional smartphone brands like Samsung or HTC, those devices might collect dust in storage facilities or in retail outlets. But since Xiaomi sells its phones directly to consumers, and gages demand based on results from its weekly online sales, there’s a strong correlation between “shipments” and “sales.”
If we do a little back-of-the-envelope math, recall that Xiaomi sold 26 million phones in the first half of 2014, and 11 million phones in the first quarter of 2014. That means that it sold 15 million phones in the second quarter. Assuming that everything that got shipped got sold (again, not an entirely unsafe assumption), that means Xiaomi sold 18 million phones during the three-month period running through September.
Xiaomi aims to sell a total of 60 million devices for the year 2014. It’s likely at about 44 million now, so the company should hit its goal as Singles Day and Christmas are around the corner. Xiaomi president Lin Bin recently told Nikkei Asian Review that he and Lei expect to sell 100 million phones in 2015.
See: China leaps over Samsung, is now China’s biggest smartphone brand
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