XIAOMI STRATEGIC ANALYSIS Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Understand the broad macro-environment of Xiaomi and the Chinese smartphone industry in terms of political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors (PESTEL/PEST/STEEPLE).
- Use our swot analysis example to gain an overall understanding of Xiaomi's strengths and weaknesses and strategic options arising from the opportunities and threats that have been identified from the Pestle analysis example on it's business environment.
- To apply strategy business models and frameworks such as Pestle/Pest/Steeple, Swot etc to real company cases.
Analyse the internal and external environment of Xiaomi and the Chinese smartphone industry using Pestel and Swot.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Xiaomi was founded in April 2010 by Lei Jun and a decade later, the company bumped Apple down the ranks to become the world’s third largest smartphone maker and its products are sold in over 90 markets around the world (Mi, 2020). Part of its growth was a result of the downward spiral of Huawei whose sales begun to fall after the US sanctions (Ting-Fang et al, 2020).
By the end of 2020, Xiaomi’s global market share was 13% ahead of Apple’s 11% and only surpassed by Samsung and Huawei whose markets shares were 22% and 14% respectively (MacMillan, 2021). The company operates in business segments like Hardware, internet services, e-commerce and new retail selling smartphones, laptops, headphones, televisions and other smart devices like electric scooters, smart bands, and power banks among others (Forbes, 2020). Some of countries in which Xiaomi is the leading smartphone vendor include India, Belarus and Ukraine with market shares of 26%, 31.95% and 31.17% respectively.
Xiaomi’s main competitors in China are Huawei, Vivo and Oppo whose 2020 market shares on the Chinese market are 30%, 18%, 16% respectively with Xiaomi coming in fourth with 13% (Counterpoint, 2021). In the third quarter of 2020, Samsung raised revenue of KRW 66.96 trillion (about $59 billion) and made a profit of KRW 12.35 trillion (about $10.6 billion), Apple reported revenue of $59.7 billion and profit of $11.25 billion and Huawei made CNY 671.3, a 9.9% increase in revenue. Xiaomi raised RMB 72.2 billion (about $10.9 billion) in revenue and RMB 4.1 billion (about $622 million) in profit. Revenue growth for Samsung, Apple and Xiaomi was 8%, 11% and 34.5% respectively.
Using PESTLE and SWOT framework, we will examine all these factors in the Chinese external macro environment as well as internationnally, that are affecting Xiaomi including the American ban. We end the analysis with examining how Xiaomi is mitigating these issues and recovering some ground on rivals.