Xiaomi Stops Disclosing Phone Sales Figures

Jon Russell, reporting for TechCrunch two weeks ago:

Xiaomi has forgone its tradition of revealing how many smartphones it sold the previous year. The strategy yielded many headlines for the highly-regarded Chinese outfit, but today its CEO admitted that Xiaomi has been in transition after growing “too fast”.

The writing was on the cards, even as early as January 2016 when Xiaomi revealed it had sold “over 70 million” devices in 2015. An impressive number, for sure, given the backdrop of slowing smartphone sales worldwide, but it was short of the company’s public target of 80 million, which was reduced from an initial 100 million.

Which companies other than Apple still release their phone sales numbers? Samsung stopped way back in 2011, and as far as I can tell, never started again. Horace Dediu wrote in 2012 that most companies had stopped the practice, and makes the case that sales estimates from outside analysts aren’t accurate.

Speaking of Xiaomi, former Google executive Hugo Barra announced today that he’ll soon be stepping down as the Xiaomi executive in charge of international and English-language sales.

★ Monday, 23 January 2017