Xiaomi, the China-based smartphone maker that has now expanded its offering to almost all categories, aims to gain a significant share of the global smartphone market share in the next year, that is 2021.
The company is reportedly increasing its factory orders for smartphones and is also in talks with suppliers to reserve components for up to 240 million phones. Figures revealed in a new Nikkei report far exceed the company’s shipping this year.
With such an ambitious plan, Xiaomi is clearly trying to outperform Apple and Huawei in terms of smartphone shipments.
For those who do not know, Xiaomi is currently the fourth largest company in the world in terms of smartphone shipments.
The report adds that Xiaomi has told some of its suppliers that the internal goal is to ship 300 million units of smartphones next year, but that doesn’t seem achievable.
Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek cannot commit to such a volume of components for a single company, especially at a time when the supply chain has been affected by COVID-19.
Even with shipments of 240 million units, Xiaomi could outperform Apple, which generally ships around 200 million units of iPhones.
Given that Huawei is being sanctioned by the United States, Xiaomi is likely to benefit.
Furthermore, the fact that Honor is no longer part of Huawei will have a significant impact on the company’s market share.
At its peak, Huawei managed to ship 240.6 million smartphones in 2019, the highest for the Chinese company. Xiaomi managed to become the fourth largest smartphone maker in 2018 and the following year, it shipped 125.6 million units.
The IDC report states that in the first nine months of this year, the company’s shipments grew 16 percent year-on-year to 104.5 million units. This growth appears to be the fuel for Xiaomi’s ambitious shipping targets for next year. It will be interesting to see how the company tries to achieve its goal.
