Xiaomi Corp.
Consumer Electronics & TechnologyFounded 2010- Updated July 2025
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: July 2025
CorpDigest
Xiaomi Corp.
Company History
Founded 2010 in Beijing, China
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Lei Jun and seven co-founders registered Xiaomi in Beijing in April 2010, backed by a $41 million seed round from Qualcomm, Temasek, and a small group of venture funds. Lei Jun had spent years running Kingsoft, the Chinese software company, and had observed Apple's iPhone launch and its effect on the mobile industry with the specific attention of someone who intended to participate in what came next.
MIUI launched in August 2010 as a custom Android ROM distributed entirely through online communities. Early adopters were technical users who flashed their existing smartphones with the new interface, providing Xiaomi with product feedback at a scale that traditional consumer surveys couldn't match. The Mi 1 smartphone followed in August 2011, priced at 1,999 yuan — substantially below equivalent-specification Android devices from Samsung or HTC.
The pricing strategy created a social dynamic: Mi devices sold out instantly through flash sales that were announced days in advance, creating scarcity and demand that made waiting lists a feature rather than a supply chain failure. By 2014, Xiaomi was valued at $45 billion in a private funding round — the largest startup valuation in the world at that point — and had entered India as its first major international market.
The 2016 near-collapse — shipments declining by an estimated 20 percent in a single year as competition intensified and the flash sale model saturated its core audience — forced a strategic reset. Offline retail expansion, regional manufacturing partnerships in India, and a diversification beyond smartphones into the IoT device category that Lei Jun had long envisioned all emerged from that difficult year. The company that entered the EV market in 2024 was built on a decade of survival and adaptation, not a straight line from 2010 startup to automotive manufacturer.
Lei Jun is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Xiaomi Corporation, which he established in April 2010 alongside seven co-founders after stepping down from Kingsoft. At Xiaomi, Lei Jun has served as the driving philosophical and commercial force behind the company's hardware-at-cost, software-monetization model. He is known in China for his public persona as an accessible, consumer-oriented entrepreneur—a contrast to the more formal executive styles common in Chinese technology leadership. Lei Jun personally led the announcement presentation for the Xiaomi SU7 electric vehicle in December 2023, delivering a performance widely compared to Steve Jobs-era Apple keynotes. In 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at approximately 8.5 billion US dollars, attributable primarily to his Xiaomi equity stake. He remains deeply involved in product development decisions across all major Xiaomi categories.
Lin Bin co-founded Xiaomi in 2010 alongside Lei Jun, bringing engineering credibility from his tenures at both Google China and Microsoft China. As President and co-CEO during Xiaomi's formative years, Lin Bin oversaw the hardware engineering and manufacturing operations that produced the Mi series smartphones. His background in software engineering from two of the world's most technically rigorous companies helped ensure that Xiaomi's hardware-software integration remained competitive from the company's earliest products. Lin Bin stepped back from full-time executive responsibilities in 2019, transitioning to an advisory and strategic role. His equity stake in Xiaomi at the time of the 2018 IPO was substantial, and he remains one of the company's significant individual shareholders.
Lei Jun and seven co-founders formally incorporated Xiaomi Corporation in Beijing in April 2010. The company's first product, MIUI—a custom Android ROM—was released in August 2010, attracting 100 development enthusiasts in its first week through online community forums and eventually growing to millions of users before a single hardware product was sold.
Xiaomi released the Mi 1 smartphone in August 2011 at 1,999 yuan, featuring flagship-equivalent specifications at roughly half the price of comparable Android devices. The first 300,000 units sold out in 34 hours exclusively through online orders, establishing the flash-sale model and generating nationwide media coverage in China.
Xiaomi began its first international product launches in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. The company also reported revenues of 12.6 billion yuan for the full year and achieved a smartphone market share position in the top five in China—a country of over a billion mobile subscribers—for the first time.
Xiaomi raised Series E funding at a valuation of approximately 45 billion US dollars from investors including DST Global and Singapore's GIC, briefly making it the world's most valuable private technology startup. The company also entered India in July 2014 through an exclusive partnership with Flipkart, selling the first batch of Redmi 1S devices in a flash sale that sold out in seconds.
Annual smartphone shipments fell to an estimated 55 to 60 million units from 71 million in 2015 as Huawei's Honor brand cannibalized Xiaomi's online market share and supply chain constraints limited inventory availability. Lei Jun responded by personally taking over the smartphone hardware division and announcing a major investment in offline retail and international diversification.
Xiaomi shipped approximately 92 million smartphones, recovering sharply from 2016's trough. The company opened over 200 Mi Home retail stores in China, became the top-selling smartphone brand in India, and reported revenues of approximately 114.6 billion yuan—representing a near-doubling over 2016 levels.
Xiaomi listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on July 9, 2018, raising approximately 4.7 billion US dollars at an IPO price that valued the company at approximately 54 billion US dollars. The listing was one of the largest globally in 2018 and marked Xiaomi's transition to a publicly accountable governance structure with quarterly financial reporting obligations.
In January 2021, the US Department of Defense listed Xiaomi as an alleged Chinese military company. Xiaomi filed a legal challenge in US federal district court and, in May 2021, won a court order requiring the US government to remove the designation. The episode demonstrated Xiaomi's legal and reputational risk management capabilities and resolved without permanent market access damage.
Xiaomi unveiled HyperOS, the successor to MIUI, in October 2023—a unified operating system designed to connect smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, and electric vehicles through a common software identity layer. In December 2023, Lei Jun personally presented the Xiaomi SU7 electric sedan at a launch event that generated more than 100 million social media impressions within 48 hours in China.
Xiaomi began delivering the SU7 electric sedan in March 2024, receiving over 50,000 pre-orders within four hours of opening reservations. The company delivered approximately 135,000 SU7 units during the calendar year. Full-year 2024 revenues reached 365.9 billion yuan (approximately 50.6 billion US dollars), a 35 percent increase, with adjusted net profit rising 141 percent to 27.2 billion yuan.
The Xiaomi 14 Ultra, featuring a Leica-co-engineered variable aperture camera system with a 1-inch Sony sensor, received widespread recognition from European photography publications as a top-tier smartphone camera platform, directly validating Xiaomi's premium brand repositioning strategy and demonstrating that the company's flagship devices could command attention and purchase consideration in the 1,000-dollar-plus segment globally.
Xiaomi expanded its electric vehicle lineup with the SU7 Ultra performance variant and the YU7 SUV, targeting both the high-performance enthusiast segment and the larger family SUV market. The company guided toward more than 300,000 EV unit deliveries in 2025, targeting EV segment breakeven on an adjusted basis, while continuing to invest in AI integration across HyperOS for all device categories.
Zimi Corporation, the manufacturer of what became the Mi Power Bank product line, was among Xiaomi's earliest ecosystem partner investments. Xiaomi took a minority equity stake as part of its strategy of seeding companies that would manufacture HyperOS-compatible products under the Xiaomi ecosystem umbrella. The investment gave Xiaomi access to portable battery technology and manufacturing capabilities without requiring in-house development. It also established the template for Xiaomi's broader ecosystem investment model that now encompasses approximately 100 partner companies.
Xiaomi invested in Beijing Roborock Technology Co., Ltd. As an early ecosystem partner to develop robot vacuum cleaners under the Xiaomi Mi Home brand. Roborock was founded by former Xiaomi engineers and represented the kind of deep ecosystem partnership where co-founder institutional knowledge accelerated product quality and HyperOS integration. The investment positioned Xiaomi to offer premium-quality robotic cleaning products at price points substantially below established brands like iRobot without requiring internal manufacturing investment.
Xiaomi led a funding round in Ninebot, a Chinese self-balancing vehicle and electric scooter manufacturer, alongside Sequoia Capital China. Ninebot subsequently acquired Segway, the iconic US personal mobility brand, in a transaction that gave the combined entity both established intellectual property and international brand recognition. Xiaomi's investment positioned it to offer electric scooters—which became among its most popular IoT products globally—at competitive prices through the Ninebot-Xiaomi partnership.
As Xiaomi began serious development of its electric vehicle program, the company identified autonomous driving technology as a critical capability gap. Deepmotion Tech Limited was a Beijing-based autonomous driving software company with expertise in computer vision, sensor fusion, and AI-based driving intelligence. Xiaomi's acquisition of Deepmotion brought this team and its intellectual property in-house, accelerating the development of Xiaomi's proprietary Xiaomi Pilot advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that powers the SU7's self-driving features.
As Xiaomi expanded its fast-charging technology development—a feature that has become a key competitive differentiator in the premium Android smartphone segment—the company made a series of smaller acquisitions and investments in power management IC and fast-charging protocol companies. These investments supplemented internal R&D to accelerate development of Xiaomi's proprietary HyperCharge technology, which demonstrated 200W wired fast charging and 120W wireless charging speeds in publicly released demos that established Xiaomi as the industry leader in charging speed.
Xiaomi was founded on April 6, 2010 in Beijing by Lei Jun together with seven co-founders, all veterans of the Chinese internet and consumer-electronics industries who had been recruited personally by Lei over a several-month courtship in late 2009 and early 2010. The other seven were Lin Bin, formerly vice president of engineering at Google China and head of Google Mobile; Li Wanqiang, who had run user-interface design at Kingsoft, the office-software company Lei had previously chaired; Hong Feng, the senior product manager from Google China responsible for Google Music; Wang Chuan, a veteran of consumer electronics from BBK; Liu De, an industrial designer trained at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena; Zhou Guangping, a Motorola hardware engineering executive; and Huang Jiangji, a wireless technology specialist also from Motorola. The founding meeting took place over a bowl of millet porridge, an event that later inspired the company name, since xiao mi translates literally as little rice or millet. The team raised an initial 41.1 million dollars in Series A funding from Morningside Ventures, Qiming Venture Partners, and IDG Capital in 2010 and operated from a single floor of a Beijing office building. The founding mission, articulated repeatedly by Lei Jun in early interviews, was to build smartphones with flagship specifications at half the price of Apple iPhones and Samsung Galaxy devices.
MIUI is the customized Android ROM that Xiaomi released on August 16, 2010, four months after company founding and a full year before the first Xiaomi smartphone shipped, as a deliberate strategy to build a loyal user community before any hardware existed. MIUI was based on the Android Open Source Project, the open Google base code, and added a redesigned user interface inspired by iOS, custom messaging, dialer, contacts, file management and theme engine applications, and weekly software updates released every Friday and incorporating feedback from the user community. The first MIUI build supported the Nexus One, the Samsung Galaxy S, the HTC Desire, and other popular Android devices of the era, allowing power users to flash MIUI onto existing hardware. By the time the Xiaomi Mi 1 smartphone shipped in August 2011, MIUI had attracted roughly half a million enthusiast users across China, Taiwan, Singapore, and other Chinese-speaking markets, with active forum participation from tens of thousands of power users who submitted bug reports and feature suggestions through the official forum. The user-community feedback loop became central to Xiaomi's product-development model, and the Friday update cadence persisted for more than a decade. MIUI was renamed HyperOS in October 2023 as Xiaomi unified its smartphone, electric vehicle, smart home, wearable, and tablet platforms under a single operating-system identity.
Xiaomi shipped its first smartphone, the Mi 1, on August 16, 2011, exactly one year after the launch of the MIUI ROM and using the same date deliberately to anchor a company anniversary tradition. The Mi 1 was priced at 1,999 yuan, roughly three hundred US dollars at the time, and offered a 1.5 gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 processor, four-inch 854 by 480 LCD display, eight-megapixel rear camera, and one gigabyte of RAM, specifications competitive with the most expensive flagship smartphones of 2011 at roughly half the price of the contemporaneous Apple iPhone 4S or Samsung Galaxy S II in China. The Mi 1 was sold exclusively through the Xiaomi website using a flash-sale model in which inventory was released in small batches at predetermined times, with each batch selling out in minutes. The first batch of 100,000 Mi 1 units sold out in 34 minutes on October 20, 2011, and subsequent batches throughout late 2011 and 2012 sold out in increasingly short windows as social-media demand built. The flash-sale model became a Xiaomi trademark for years and was driven by lean inventory and aggressive marketing on Weibo and the Xiaomi forum community rather than traditional retail distribution. Xiaomi shipped 7.2 million smartphones in 2012, its first full year of phone sales, ranking as the fastest-growing smartphone manufacturer in Chinese history at that time.
Xiaomi Corporation completed its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on July 9, 2018, raising approximately 4.7 billion US dollars at a valuation of roughly 54 billion dollars, making it the largest technology IPO globally in 2018 and the second-largest IPO in Hong Kong history at the time. Xiaomi priced shares at 17 Hong Kong dollars, the bottom of its 17 to 22 Hong Kong dollar indicative range, after a difficult roadshow that had seen weakening demand for technology IPOs amid US-China trade tensions and concerns about Xiaomi's hardware-margin profile. The shares traded down 5.9 percent on debut, closing the first day at 16.80 Hong Kong dollars, although they recovered to trade above the IPO price within several months. Xiaomi was the first company to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the new weighted-voting-rights regime introduced in April 2018, which allowed Lei Jun to retain a majority of voting power despite a minority economic stake. Cornerstone investors included Hillhouse Capital, China Mobile, Qualcomm, and CICC. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and CLSA led the underwriting syndicate. The IPO crystallized founder Lei Jun's personal wealth at roughly 12 billion dollars and provided liquidity to early investors including Morningside, IDG, Qiming, and DST Global. The Hong Kong listing trades under the ticker 1810.
Xiaomi expanded internationally beginning in 2014 as the Chinese domestic smartphone market approached saturation and Lei Jun set a target of becoming the largest smartphone vendor globally within a decade. The first international market was Singapore in February 2014, followed by Malaysia in April 2014 and the Philippines in May 2014, all chosen for their large ethnically Chinese populations and existing demand for Xiaomi products through gray-market import. India became the strategic priority from July 2014 when Xiaomi launched on Flipkart with the Mi 3 and subsequently with Hugo Barra, the former Google Android vice president recruited by Lei Jun in October 2013 to lead international expansion. India grew to become Xiaomi's largest market outside China by 2017 and the company built local manufacturing in Sriperumbudur and Noida with partner Foxconn to comply with the Indian government's Make in India tariff regime. Europe became the third pillar of expansion from 2017, beginning with Spain in November 2017 and expanding to Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Nordics. By 2024 Xiaomi was the third-largest smartphone vendor globally by units behind Samsung and Apple, ranking number one in India, number one in Spain, number one in Russia, and a top-three player across Latin America. Africa and the Middle East have been progressively prioritized since 2020 through dedicated regional management based in Dubai.