In an e-mail sent to its employees on Sunday, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said that the company sold 61.1 million smartphones in 2014, up 227 percent from 18.7 million units tallied in 2013, Xinhua said.
Lei's remarks came weeks before the planned release of the new Xiaomi smartphone "redme2," which is priced at 699 Chinese yuan (about 120,000 Korean won), much cheaper than previous models.
The competition in the global smartphone market will intensify in 2015 as the growth in China's smartphone market has slowed down, he was quoted as saying. China is the world's largest smartphone market.
Xiaomi, founded in 2010, jumped to the third-largest smartphone maker by sales volume worldwide in 2014. South Korea's Samsung Electronics retained the No. 1 spot, followed by Apple Inc. headquartered in Cupertino, California, the United States.
According to U.S. market researcher Gartner Inc., Xiaomi took up a 5.2 percent share in the global smartphone market in the third quarter of 2014, with its sales reaching 15.7 million units, a four-fold rise from 3.62 million units tallied a year earlier.
The comparable figure stood at 24.4 percent for Samsung, down 7.7 percentage points from a year earlier, and 12.7 percent for Apple.
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
