Chinese smartphone start-up Xiaomi is claiming it has sold 100,000 of its Mi3 smartphones within just 90 seconds of its launch.
The extraordinary sales claim was made on Twitter by Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra, who resigned in August as Google’s vice president of product management in favour of the position at Xiaomi under chief executive Lei Jun.
“100,000 Xiaomi Mi3 devices sold in under 90 secs on Xiaomi.com in China, and 3,000 MiTVs sold in under 2 mins,” Barra tweeted.
Barra also posted a blog post about his experiences as a western executive at a Chinese tech giant, which released its first smartphone in August 2011 after launching in 2010.
“Xiaomi is every bit as fascinating and Google-like as I expected. The engineering floor is always busy with people building well into the night. The teams are small and scrappy, and speed (in both UX and execution) is always a top priority,” Barra says.
“Social media is huge in China — bigger than anything I’ve seen in the west. [Chinese social network] Sina Weibo, the most popular micro-blogging platform in China, has over 500 million registered users and over 50 million DAUs [daily active users].”
Recent marketshare figures showed it had beaten out a range of established rivals, including ZTE, HTC and Lenovo, to claim one of the top five spots in the Chinese smartphone market.
According to the TrendForce figures, Xiaomi now claims 7.1% of the market, ahead of HTC (6.8%), Lenovo (6.3%) and ZTE (5.1%).
The figures also place the company within striking distance of Apple on 8.8%, Nokia on 8.2% and Huawei on 8%, although a long way behind Samsung’s 21.5% marketshare.
The company has often been criticised as being an Apple imitator due to chief executive Jun’s preference for black mock turtleneck tops and jeans, along with the company’s use of an iOS-style interface, called MIUI, over Android.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
