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China Businesses Apple

Xiaomi Revenues Were Flat in 2015 (fortune.com) 55

Posted by msmash from the meanwhile-in-China dept.
Scott Cendrowski, reporting for Fortune: Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker and second highest-valued startup in the world at $45 billion, barely grew sales at all last year. Revenue for 2015 reached 78 billion yuan ($12.5 billion), a 5% rise from 2014's 74.3 billion yuan. Taking into account the falling value of the Chinese currency, the yuan, sales rose 3% in U.S. dollar terms. Xiaomi has been mum about the 2015 sales total since founder Lei Jun gave a revenue target of 100 billion yuan ($16 billion at the time) at a government meeting in March last year. Flat sales growth represents a dramatic change of fortune for Xiaomi, which until recently appeared to be enjoying the momentum befitting China's hottest startup. It was coming off sales growth of 135% in 2014, and in early 2015 founder Lei Jun said at a press conference that Xiaomi's new smartphone was even better than Apple's iPhone. However the phone, the Mi Note, amassed early user complaints about hot temperatures and didn't become the mega-seller the company might have hoped.CNBC's Jay Yarrow said "The Apple-killer is dying." For the uninitiated, Xiaomi rose to fame in 2013-14 when the company took the world by storm with its cheap-priced handsets, TVs, speakers, power banks, and cameras. These devices offered top-of-the-line specifications for their respective echelon. The company has been called out before for allegedly copying Apple's iOS design in its MIUI Android-based operating system. In the past two years, Xiaomi has expanded its business to several Asian regions, and intends to sell a number of gadgets in the United States and Europe among other regions starting later this year. The company has also expanded its product portfolio, making weighing scale, rice cooker, suitcase and a range of other items.
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Xiaomi Revenues Were Flat in 2015 More

Xiaomi Revenues Were Flat in 2015

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  • Yay hype! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Monday May 23, 2016 @11:45AM (#52165399) Journal

    Seriously - can at least one tech journalist out there look beyond the stockbroker/analyst/IPO hype and actually, you know, *look* at the company's performance? Even with as little history as Xiaomi had, its officers have had to have at least some experience elsewhere...

    • Re:Yay hype! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Monday May 23, 2016 @11:51AM (#52165471) Journal

      5% growth in a slowing market is actually pretty good. No, it isn't 15% or 10%, but it is still pretty good. And considering your investing options in the current world economy, it actually pretty damn good.

      So everything else is relative. It just depends on what you're comparing against.

      • Every company is judged on their past performance. When companies whose sales used to grow >100% per year end up essentially flat, something has changed in their business. And probably not for the better.

        • Apple used to sell zero iPhones. Then they sold a boatload of iPhones because nobody had an iPhone.

          Today, almost everyone who wants an iPhone already has one and will keep it for a few years before buying a new one. So Apple aren't selling as many iPhones as they did when they introduced them.

          So by comparison, Apple's iPhone sales are "essentially flat". That doesn't mean something changed in Apple's business, it just means the market is fucking saturated.

          I hate business people, trying to deduce "facts" fro

          • Except that Apple's sales flattened over years, from >150% to 75% to 25% to flat, over about 6 years. Xiaomi's went from 150% to 0% in 1 year.

            But yeah, it's the same thing as your explanation of what happened. Which was China is saturated....riiiiight.

  • I like quite a few of their phones, but unfortunately they've never support the proper LTE bands to allow them to be used with TMobile here in the US. Please put Band 12 support in Xiaomi!
    • My biggest gripe has been the fact that they're over priced in the US since you have to go through crappy eBay or similar overseas distribution channels. Then again, I have a soft cap of around $300 that I will spend on a smartphone. The difference in construction cost between a $700 flagship and $200 basic phone is about $70 ($70 vs $140 parts / build cost).

      I'm certainly not spending $300-600 for a Mi5 where the $300 model is crippled with low RAM/ROM (2/16GB) when I can get something vastly more usable

  • Same money as last year = dying (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Funny, that's not what they say when I ask for a raise.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 23, 2016 @11:58AM (#52165533)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • LOL.

      Everything is fine.
      The sky is not falling.
      Our sales did not have any issues.
      They 'just' stopped growing. Completely.
      When they were growing hugely the last few years.
      But everything is fine!

      No one really believes that, least of all the heads of Xiaomi.

    • the US is perhaps the only company in the world that expects quarterly and yearly earnings to approach 15% in order for performance of a company to be assured. its asinine, and partly why the US was forced to gut their manufacturing sector.

      Expected earnings depends hugely on what sector the business is in. If your market is growing 30% a year, then growing 15% is disappointing. If it's growing 5% a year, then 15% is pretty darn good.

      As for the "gutted" US manufacturing sector, it's bigger than its ever been.

  • Will the rice cookers be Bluetooth enabled?

    • They are "smart" ... but I am not sure what tech it uses (e.g., zwave or zigbee or some proprietary one with tcpip...). (I don't have one, I was just looking at wikipedia. :) )

  • expecting eternal increases? (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday May 23, 2016 @12:10PM (#52165621)

    what is with the retarded notion that if you aren't making significantly more money than you made last year that you are somehow not being profitable enough? i feel like everyone started plotting only profit increases from last year on logarithmic charts and declaring every company but their favorite unicorn is going under.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      Hear, hear!

      I better headline for this would have been "Xiaomi Revenues Were Steady in 2015".
      Oh no! We made money, just like we did last year. We must be a failure!

    • what is with the retarded notion that if you aren't making significantly more money than you made last year that you are somehow not being profitable enough?

      Because investors don't invest in a company to maintain the status quo. Investors expect a return on their investment and that means you either have to kick off a lot of highly predictable cash at a rate substantially above inflation or you have to grow the company. Furthermore the returns (growth) you generate need to be higher than alternative investments of a similar risk profile or else investors will invest their cash elsewhere. If an investor can get a 10% return on their investment with Company A

      • Because investors don't invest in a company to maintain the status quo

        last time i checked, /. isn't marketwatch.com, so fuck the investors because they are parasites on society.

        • last time i checked, /. isn't marketwatch.com, so fuck the investors because they are parasites on society.

          Everybody, including you, is an investor. So basically you are saying fuck yourself and everybody else too. Investors aren't some abstract class of rich people. Everybody invests their money in something. Everybody. Including people who read slashdot. Believe it or not some of us are engineers who also find financial markets interesting. Smart people invest their money in companies and assets that will generate a return on that investment. To generate a return those assets need to grow and become mo

          • Because investors don't invest in a company to maintain the status quo.

            Everybody, including you, is an investor.

            these two statements you have made are in direct conflict, please retract one of them.

            either i'm not an investor or some investors do invest to maintain the status quo.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by fustakrakich ( 1673220 )

      This how the derivatives market works. It's pure fantasy, but there is no other way to expand a market without expanding the population.

  • Was really the industry maturing?

    Guess the smartphone manufacturers are a bit depressed that most of their innovations haven't driven more thirst for sales? Maybe sad that Apple hasn't come out to save the industry's bacon? j/k

  • Media Bomb in the Cyber War (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cloud.pt ( 3412475 ) on Monday May 23, 2016 @12:38PM (#52165855)
    As someone deeply invested in researching and using Xiaomi devices, and having felt their quality over the years, I believe this news to be utter bull. Sources are all american. Xiaomi did a lot in 2015, its doing a lot in 2016, and that affects revenue. If someone told me they made less profit, I would be totally OK with that because they launch products like rabbits, but whoever believes Xiaomi isn't growing in revenue must be dumb or attempting to influence the market with speculation. Xiaomi has it all: it as a very decent brand, a great product line up, amazing pricing AND availability, even despite not making its devices available internationally (sites like gearbest take care of that high cost for them, and we, the final consumer use them indiscriminately). It is flat out impossible this brand made less revenue than in 2014 - they launched the Mi4, but the OnePlus killed its market for most of 2014. The S6 came right after. If they managed to make 135% revenue with the low season of 2014, considering those 2 very successful devices came right before or during prime season, I highly doubt the very uneventful 2015 (for most other brands) could have killed them. I mean, they released about 6 of the most interesting devices for the low-mid range: Redmi 2 and 3, Redmi Note 2 and 3, the Mi4 cheap variants 4s and 4c (this one being one of my favourite devices ever on the market as it matches a N5x for half price at launch, and still gives it a run for the money despite de N5X price cut). And this is just the mobile side of the thing. I am sure they are making gazillions with the old and new Mi bands, and I don't even have to mention the weird products they launch in the market, from water purifiers, passing through wifi routers, smart TVs, smart TV boxes, to audiophile-graded headphones like the Piston 3 or the hybrids (seriously, they're praised in places like head-fi forums, it has to mean something). I don't believe they are even making less profit, let alone less revenue. Prove me wrong, I dare you internet

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by eyenot ( 102141 )

      Since you don't trust non-Chinese sources on this, let's see, you're going to have to rely on whatever information the Chinese government allows to pass through their Great Firewall. And frankly, you can't trust what the Chinese Government says about anything. Nor what Chinese academics say about anything. Nor what the Chinese stock market tickers and brokers say about anything.

      Your challenge is pretty lopsided.

      • First of all, I never mentioned I only trusted Chinese sources. The article itself cites chinese sources, but faiIs to provide links as they state themselves the links were removed. How fun it would be if we could all go and start outing news in the ways of "a very official source said this but then they retracted it so it must be true". We don't even know the whys of this retraction, who knows, maybe they were even wrong! I do agree about misleading information coming from China, but they didn't start out

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by eyenot ( 102141 )

          I didn't realize you were mostly focused on criticizing Fortune's lack of sound method in journalism. That is disheartening; but I don't read Fortune, any way.

          I thought maybe you were shilling for Xiaomi. After all, if they have a public stock available, you might be invested in them and hope to counteract any negative publicity. That's sort of how it looked.

          China may not have "started out on misinformation campaigns", but ever since WW2 the U.S. has reported that the Chinese are ahead of us in signal intel

      • Something I forgot to mention: I believe the main problem is Xiaomi is mainly present on markets with very bad information gathering methodologies. They are mostly popular in China, India and southern asian neighbors, Russia and east-europe. From some connections I got, they also have an arm and leg in south america, as south america is all in for the drop-shipping "scams" from people who abuse the low prices in china retailers like gearbest and set up "virtual shops" that just mediate transactions at a cos

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's just bullshit and FUD to try to make investors and buyers to swing to the American side. As the years go on, the Americans will become more and more desperate to try to save their sinking Dollar.

      • It's just bullshit and FUD to try to make investors and buyers to swing to the American side. As the years go on, the Americans will become more and more desperate to try to save their sinking Dollar.

        You do know that it's CHINA that's most concerned about a sinking US dollar, right?

    • Agreed, I found out about their products fairly recently but have been a fan ever since, carrying on to this day. Excellent price and quality, I've even vouched for them here in the past. I love the Piston 3 Youth Edition earbuds, sounds great, perfect price and hasn't broken on me. I'd treat other headphones with care but they would break consistently in about 8 months.

  • Hearing this news I simply shrug my shoulders. The government sanctioned mafia probably decided the startup was big enough to start laundering money through and extorting from.

  • FUD (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23, 2016 @01:02PM (#52166023)

    12.5 billions in sales mean "flat"? I guess they would call Apple having "gone flat" if they had not tricked people into buying the Apple Watch last year. Xiaomi makes high-quality products at affordable prices, and with 12.5 billions in sales, investors would be wise to invest.

  • The real reason. They have nothing new to clone. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It is a chinese company. If there is nothing new to rip off, what value other than cheaper do/did they have to offer. China companies needs to emulate Samsung for the proper way to pirate and then innovate (sort of).

  • Their problem is easily identified (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday May 23, 2016 @01:29PM (#52166225)

    The company has also expanded its product portfolio, making weighing scale, rice cooker, suitcase and a range of other items.

    There's the problem, identified right there in the summary - they're only making one of each thing. If they want to take advantage of economies of scale, they need to start making products en masse.

  • See? That's what the same breathless stories about Apple amount to.

  • That's what you get if you compete on price. Lower revenues.

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