HONG KONG — Xiaomi, the smartphone start-up that showed the potential and the limits of a new generation of Chinese technology companies, is losing its most familiar global face.
On Monday, Hugo Barra, a Google veteran who ran Xiaomi's global division, said he planned to resign and return to Silicon Valley. Mr. Barra became the global face of Xiaomi, a little-known, tough-to-pronounce phone maker as it became a well-known brand and a sign of China's newfound tech prowess.
But his departure comes as some of that promise looks to be in doubt. Xiaomi grew quickly in China by selling cheaper smartphones with premium features, initially only online. It has had mixed success outside China, however. At home, it faces rising competition from big, deep-pocketed rivals like Huawei Technologies and other scrappy upstarts like the Chinese brand OnePlus.
Two years ago, Xiaomi was valued around $ 45 billion. Today, the company, which is privately held, is widely considered to be worth far less.
In a note about his resignation on Facebook, Mr. Barra, who joined Xiaomi in 2013, called his time there "spectacular" and said that he was moving on for personal reasons.
"But what I've realized is that the last few years of living in such a singular environment have taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health," he wrote, adding that he was moving back to Silicon Valley to be closer to friends and family.
Bryan Ma, an analyst at IDC, said that Mr. Barra's departure was a blow to the company and that it called into question the future of Xiaomi's fledgling overseas business.
"The question is, Who will replace him? Will that person be as effective an ambassador?" he said. "They're doing fine in India, but what happens for everything else? Where does this all sit in the grand plan they had several years ago to expand to a bunch of markets?"
Xiang Wang, a veteran of Qualcomm who has led Xiaomi's supply chain and intellectual property rights teams, will take over Mr. Barra's responsibilities and lead Xiaomi's global business, Xiaomi said. Mr. Barra did not respond to a request for comment.
Xiaomi has long been targeted by critics who accuse it of copying rivals. Yet its earlier success presaged the rise of other Chinese start-ups, such as the drone maker DJI, and demonstrated the power of the country's fast-growing e-commerce sector.
Mr. Barra, the vice president responsible for Xiaomi's global division, presided over international expansion. Unlike China's other major internet companies, Xiaomi made an early decision to expand beyond China's borders, targeting markets like India, Myanmar and Brazil.
Mr. Barra, a widely recognized name in the tech world, was often the public face of that expansion. Orchestrating product releases in new markets and acting as an ambassador, he often gave talks in local markets to build buzz.
Xiaomi has done relatively well in India, which accounted for about 18 percent of the company's total phone shipments in the third quarter of 2016, according to IDC.
In other markets it has been less successful. For instance, after a high-profile release of its phones in Mr. Barra's home country of Brazil in 2015, the company has not been able to establish a significant beachhead there.
Competition has intensified in China from Huawei, OnePlus, Lenovo Group Limited and other companies getting into the handset business. From the third quarter of 2015 to the third quarter of 2016, Xiaomi's market share in China dropped to 8 percent from 16 percent, according to IDC.
Continue reading the main story
No comments:
Post a Comment