Xiaomi is looking to expand its reach into the smartphone market. The Chinese company just announced that its new Redmi smartphone will go on sale in Singapore starting Feb. 21.
The Xiaomi Redmi will be the first Xiaomi smartphone to be sold outside of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It's a very big step for Xiaomi, but perhaps not a surprising one, given the recent appointment of Google's Hugo Barra six months ago. Soon after Barra's announcement that he was going to be the CEO of Xiaomi, speculation was rife that he would spearhead Xiaomi's efforts to go global. Now it seems that Barra has started the ball rolling.
Currently, the Redmi is the only smartphone listed on Xiaomi's Singapore website, but it seems to be a sign of things to come. The Redmi is a low-to-mid-end smartphone with decent specifications. It is also the cheapest of Xiaomi's smartphones, retailing for just $133.
The Redmi features a 4.2-inch 720p display and is powered by a quad-core MediaTek MT6589 processor, running at 1.5 GHz. It comes with 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of storage, a micro SD card slot for expansion and an 8-megapixel camera on the back. The Redmi gets its graphics from a PowerVR SGX544 GPU and harnesses power from a 2000 mAh battery. The device is running Xiaomi's custom version of Android called MIUI, which features a few nice user interface changes from the standard version of Android.
Although Xiaomi's choice of Singapore as its next launching point might not seem intuitive, it is the right choice. According to Nielsen, 87 percent of the population in Singapore owns a smartphone. To put that number in perspective, the United States, which most people would consider a very technologically advanced society, has only 60 percent of its population using a smartphone. If Xiaomi wants to grow its following, Singapore is the perfect place to be.
The Redmi should sell very well in Singapore because of its low price and decent specifications. Singapore is technically an emerging market and a growing one at that, so the price has to be right if Xiaomi wants to make a big impact in that country. Xiaomi has already had similar success in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, so it stands a good chance of conquering Singapore, too. At one point in August 2013, Canalys reported that Xiaomi had surpassed Apple in popularity in China and that is no easy feat. Now it stands to do the same in Singapore.
