After Gionee and Oppo, another Chinese smartphone company 'Xiaomi' is planning to enter the Indian market. Xiaomi's global vice president Hugo Barra in an interview with CNET said the company plans to sell smartphones at low price, almost close to cost, in the Indian market.
According to Barra, Xiaomi will not restrict to the market's low-end segment, but deliver "aggressively priced phones focused on performance and quality." Xiaomi's business model in India will be similar to the one in China.
It already has planned a new office while Barra is working to team up with telecom operators and other partners to develop an ecosystem. For online sales, the company would be adopting Apple-like model in the country. It already has same system in China.
Barra, the former Googler passionately believes Xiaomi is capable of becoming a global brand. "We're just starting to think about building truly, truly global products. I think Xiaomi's already good at that because of the mentality of some of the senior engineers. A lot of them have worked at Google or in Silicon Valley, and we have a bunch of ex-Facebook engineers. We have people with the global mentality," he is quoted as saying.
"In a year or two, we will have completely shifted towards building inherently global products. Whenever we think about a new feature, we try to think about it from a Chinese perspective and a global perspective."
On possibilities about launching smartphones based on Firefox OS or Ubuntu, Barra said: "We have no plans to do anything other than Android. There's no point. Android has a phenomenal ecosystem. I'm saying this from a practical perspective. If you look at other players who have attempted to build ecosystems and failed despite having great platforms, it's because it takes a lot of work and a lot of time to build an ecosystem," he explains.
"Google has done that with Android, and we're firmly behind it. We're heavily invested as well. We don't just take Android from Google — we make a significant amount of improvements, changes, and additions to Android. We think we've made Android an even better operating system."
You can check out Barra's full interview with Cnet here.