Xiaomi’s juggernaut in India hits a rough patch
The smartphone company—struggling at home—faces ever greater challenges in what is now its biggest market
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Editor's note: If you bought a new Xiaomi smartphone in India recently, you are unlikely to have missed a small sticker on the top of the box: “India’s No. 1 smartphone brand”. The company's fantastic success in the growing Indian smartphone market has made it the top smartphone brand in the country, displacing behemoths like Samsung, while warding off the challenge from other Chinese brands that hit Indian shores around the same time Xiaomi did. In 2019, Xiaomi completed five years in the Indian market. Between anniversary celebrations and taking some pot-shots at the competition, Xiaomi kept pushing the numero uno narrative in every way it could. But if you look past all that glory—and some complacency in 2018—Xiaomi faces more than one conundrum in 2020. While Xiaomi outflanked Samsung as the top smartphone brand in India, if one dives deeper, you realize that BBK Electronics has slowly, but assuredly, risen to the top of the leaderboard of the smartphone manufacturers in India. Founded in 1998 by Duan Yongping, BBK Electronics Corp. started off as a manufacturer and distributor of consumer electronics …
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