China's Xiaomi has now become the third-largest smartphone vendor in the world after being in the market for only three years.
With a market share of 5.3 percent, it follows Samsung's 25 percent and Apple's 12 percent. Lenovo and LG tied at the fourth spot wherein both have a little more than 5 percent of market share.
One of the key reasons for its success is the Mi4 smartphone launched in August, which is being touted as a high-end alternative to currently available devices. Xiaomi has been the top-selling brand in China, its home market. Recently, it started to retail in India where the devices are sold exclusively through Flipkart.
Hugo Barra, the company's vice president, said that Xiaomi aims to sell 100,000 phones every week in India in October, which is in time with the country's Diwali celebration. Diwali is a festival of lights symbolizing the victory of righteousness and the lifting of spiritual darkness and commemorates Lord Rama's return to his kingdom after a 14-year exile.
Xiaomi's position as the third-largest smartphone vendor in the world makes it a first-time achievement for the company to belong to the top 5 ranking smartphones as identified by the research firm IDC. A separate report done by Strategy Analytics also places Xiaomi in the third spot.
Apart from the Mi4 launch, another attribution for Xiaomi's success is the company's focus on China and the neighboring markets in Southeast Asia. The move has definitely helped boost Xiaomi to land in the top 5 and achieve a triple-digit year-over-year growth in the third quarter of the year.
However, it is still unclear on how Xiaomi would fare in markets which are otherwise dominated by Samsung and Apple.
In this year's third quarter, there are a total of 327.6 million smartphone units that are shipped. This number shows a 25.2 percent growth compared with the 261.7 million units sold in last year's third quarter. It's also an 8.7 percent growth from the 301.3 million units that were shipped in the second quarter of the year.
"We've finally reached a point where most developed markets are experiencing single-digit growth, while emerging markets are still growing at more than 30 percent collectively," said Ryan Reith, program director with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
Reith adds that while the overall volume brings great news, the new challenge that vendors have to face is how to earn revenue from devices that are rapidly becoming commodity items.
Xiaomi's ranking shows that there is still room for vendors to compete in the market. Though it has faced criticism on its security practices, the company has managed to emerge as the new star in the smartphone world.
