Xiaomi is rumored to be preparing to make a splash in the U.S. mobile market, territory saturated by smartphones and tablets produced by Samsung and Apple.
But Xiaomi may only be seeking to make its presence known in the U.S., while seeking to wash over Apple and Samsung in under-served markets like Brazil and India.
The company whose name roughly translates into Little Rice has already stated its intent to gain a foothold in two of the countries in the Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) market. Xiaomi has already surged ahead of Apple and Samsung at home in China and announced in the late summer of 2014 that it is betting big on India -- Xiaomi predicts that India will rival China's mobile market in just a few years.
Samsung still holds the crown and sits atop the global mobile market, but the Korean tech company is slowly loosing its grip. As the market for feature phones dissolves and converts into smartphone sales, Samsung has been the biggest loser in the mobile hardware market.
Residents in BRIC countries are fast dumping their feature phones for smartphones, and Xiaomi is making a strong push to ensure that its hardware saturates markets thistry for feature-rich products.
Xiaomi recently expanded into India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. The company plans to move into the rest of the BRIC countires by expanding into Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey and Russia in 2015.
Little Rice is washing over the globe as Samsung and Apple sandbag the U.S. and Western Europe. Xiaomi is fresh off a $1.1 billion round of funding, which billionaire investor Yuri Miller says could more than double the company's current market valuation of $45 billion to $100 billion.
There is still much more work Xiaomi will need to do and do well to rival Samsung and Apple's shares of the global smartphone market, which were 24.4 percent and 12.7 percent, respectively, in the third quarter of 2014. Xiaomi's share of 5.2 percent put it 0.1 percent behind Huawei, good enough for fourth place.
Despite its share of the smartphone market being dwarfed by Samsung and Apple, the four-year-old Xiaomi is still considered a startup company. Little Rice's big gains were no small feat and the company's latest round of investments indicate that Xiaomi's growth won't be contained by market forced for quite some time.
Other hardware companies based in China have been taking note of Xiaomi's user-centric model and value-priced flagship phones. Together, the top three Chinese brands accounted for approximately 15.5 percent of the global market for smartphones.
