Tag: Xiaomi

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Google is bringing data saver feature to Android TVs

Google said on Tuesday it is bringing a set of new features to Android TVs to improve the experience of users who rely on mobile hotspots to connect their giant devices to the internet. The features, developed by Google’s Next Billion Users team, will be first rolled out to users in India and then in other countries, the company said.

Ahead of its yearly event in New Delhi on Thursday, where the company is expected to make a number of announcements, Google said it has identified and addressed a problem faced by millions of users: Their TVs are not connected to the internet through Wi-Fi or wired/ethernet line.

Instead these users rely on hotspots (local network) created through their smartphones or tablets. “But that presents problems,” wrote Joris van Mens, Product Manager at Google’s Next Billion Users team, in a blog post. “Watching HD TV on a mobile data connection can quickly drain your daily data plan.”

To address this, Google says it is introducing a feature called ‘data saver’ to Android TVs that would reduce the data usage on mobile connections by up to three times, thereby allowing users to consume more content on their TVs. It is also introducing a ‘data alerts’ feature to help users better monitor how much data they have consumed watching TV.

Google data saver

The data saver feature will be optional to users

Another feature dubbed ‘hotspot guide’ will allow users to set up their TV with their mobile hotspot. And last, Google is introducing the ability to allow users to cast video files locally stored on their phones to the TV without using internet data.

These four features will roll-out to Android TV devices starting with those manufactured by Xiaomi, TCL, and Marq by Flipkart, Google said. The company expects to rollout the features globally soon.

At an event in Bangalore on Tuesday, Xiaomi unveiled a new lineup of TVs that will support Netflix and Prime Video. The Chinese electronics giant, which is the top smartphone vendor in India, confirmed that its new TV models will support Google’s ‘data saver’ feature.

Later this week, Google is expected to make a number of announcements around its payments app and other services in its yearly Google for India event. Indian newspaper Economic Times reported this week that one of those announcements could be the launch of Kormo, a job discovery app that is currently available in select developing markets, in India.

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InMobi’s Glance raises $45M to expand outside of India

Glance, a subsidiary of Indian mobile ad business firm InMobi, said today it has raised $45 million as it prepares to scale its business outside of India and expand its product offerings.

The unnamed, maiden financing round for Glance was funded by Mithril Capital, a growth stage investment firm co-founded by Silicon Valley investors Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi Group, said the current round has not closed and could bag another $30 million to $55 million in the next two months.

Glance operates an eponymous service that shows media content in local languages on the lock screen of Android-powered smartphones. InMobi has partnered with a number of top smartphone vendors including Xaomi, Samsung, and Gionee to integrate Glance into their operating systems.

Glance, which was launched in September last year and supports English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, has amassed 50 million monthly active users in India, its primary market. Users are spending an average of 22 minutes with Glance each day, he said.

“All the new smartphone models launched by Samsung, Xiaomi, and a handful of other vendors have launched with Glance on them,” Tiwari said.

In a statement, Mithril Capital’s Rohan, said, “We share Glance’s global vision of breaking through the constraints of application architectures and linguistic markets to deliver rich, frictionless, and engaging experiences across a myriad of cultures and languages.” As part of the financing round, he is joining Glance’s board.

Glance does not show traditional ads, something it intends to never change, but shows a certain kind of content to drive engagement for brands.

In the months to come, Glance plans to expand the platform and bring short-form videos (Glance TV), and mini games (Glance Games) to the lock screen. It is also working on a feature dubbed Glance Location that will enable brands to court users in their vicinity, and Glance Shopping to explore ways to bring commerce around content.

As of today, InMobi Group is not monetizing Glance platform, but plans to explore ways to make money from it by early next year, Tiwari said.

The 12-year-old firm said it plans to expand footprints of Glance outside of India. The company plans to take Glance to some Southeast Asian markets like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. InMobi’s Tiwari said the Glance has already started to find users in these markets.

InMobi Group, which had raised $320 million prior to today’s financing round, has been profitable for several years. But the company decided to raise external funding to accelerate Glance’s growth, Tiwari said.

The firm, which has three subsidiaries including its marquee marketing cloud division, plans to go public in the next few years. But instead of taking the entire group public, Tiwari said the firm is thinking of publicly listing each division as they mature. The marketing cloud division, which brings in the vast majority of revenue for the firm, will go public first, he said.

“The IPO plans remain, and we will evaluate them as we go along. The reality, however, is that the market is so big and there is so much room that we can continue to be private for a few more years,” he said.

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Xiaomi has shipped 100 million smartphones in India

Xiaomi said on Friday it has shipped over 100 million smartphones in India, its most important market, since beginning operations in the nation five years ago. The company cited figures from research firm IDC in its claim.

The Chinese giant, which has held the top smartphone vendor position in India for eight straight quarters, said its budget smartphone series Redmi and Redmi Note were its top selling lineups in India.

“It’s a testament to the love we have received from millions of Mi Fans since our inception. There have been brands who entered the market before us, yet are nowhere close to the astounding feat we have achieved,” said Manu Jain, VP of Xiaomi and MD of the company’s India business, in a statement.

As competition in its home nation intensified, India has emerged as the most important market for Xiaomi in recent years. When the Chinese firm entered the nation, for the first two years, it relied mostly on selling handsets online to cut overhead. But in the years since, it has established presence in brick-and-mortar market, which continues to drive much of the sales in the nation.

xiaomi india

Image: Manish Singh / TechCrunch

Last month, Xiaomi said the company is on track to building presence in 10,000 physical stores in the country by the end of the year. It expects offline market to drive half of its sales by that time frame.

Even as smartphones continues to be its marquee business in India, Xiaomi has also brought a range of other hardware products to India and has built software services for the local market. The company has also donned the hat of an investor, backing a number of startups including local social network ShareChat, which recently raised $100 million from Twitter and others, fintech startups KrazyBee and ZestMoney, and entertainment app provided Hungama.

In recent interviews with TechCrunch, Xiaomi executives have said that they maintain a dedicated team in India that looks at opportunities in investing in startups.

More to follow…

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Google falls to third place in worldwide smart speaker market

The global smart speaker market grew 55.4% in the second quarter to reach 26.1 million shipments, according to a new report from Canalys. Amazon continued to lead the race, accounting for 6.6 million units shipped in the quarter. Google, however, fell to the third spot as China’s Baidu surged ahead. Baidu in Q2 grew a sizable 3,700% to reach 4.5 million units, overtaking Google’s 4.3 million units shipped.

China’s market overall doubled its quarterly shipments to 12.6 million units, or more than twice the U.S.’s 6.1 million total. The latter represents a slight (2.4%) decline since the prior quarter.

Baidu’s growth in the quarter was attributed to aggressive marketing and go-to-market campaigns. It was particularly successful in terms of smart displays, which accounted for 45% of the products it shipped.

“Local network operator’s interests on the [smart display] device category soared recently. This bodes well for Baidu as it faces little competition in the smart display category, allowing the company to dominate in the operator channel,” noted Canalys Research Analyst Cynthia Chen.

Meanwhile, Google was challenged by the Nest rebranding in Q2, the analyst firm said.

The report also suggested that Google should to introduce a revamped smart speaker portfolio to rekindle consumer interest. The Google Home device hasn’t been updated since launch — still sporting the air freshener-style looks it had back in 2016. And the Google Home mini hasn’t received much more than a color change.

Instead, Google’s attention as of late has been on making it easier for device manufacturers to integrate with Google Assistant technology, in addition to its increased focus on smart displays.

Amazon, by comparison, has updated its Echo line of speakers several times while expanding Alexa to devices with screens like the Echo Spot and Show, and to those without like the Echo Plus, Echo Dot, Echo Auto, and others — even clocks and microwaves, as sort of public experiments in voice computing.

That said, both Amazon and Google turned their attention to non-U.S. markets in Q2, the report found. 50% of Amazon’s smart speaker shipments were outside the U.S. in Q2, up from 32% in Q2 last year. And 55% of Google’s shipments were outside the U.S., up from 42% in Q2 2018.

table ifnal final

Beyond the top 3 — Amazon, Baidu and now No. 3 Google — the remaining top 5 included Alibaba and Xiaomi, with 4.1 million and 2.8 million units shipped in Q2, respectively.

The rest of the market, which would also include Apple’s HomePod, totaled 3.7 million units.

 

 

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Xiaomi tops Indian smartphone market for eighth straight quarter

Xiaomi now has been India’s top smartphone seller for eight straight quarters. The company has become a constant headache for Samsung in the world’s second largest smartphone market as sales have slowed pretty much everywhere else in the world.

The Chinese electronics giant shipped 10.4 million handsets in the quarter that ended in June commanding 28.3% of the market, research firm IDC reported Tuesday. Its closest rival, Samsung — which once held the top spot in India — shipped 9.3 million handsets in the nation during the same period, settling for a 25.3% market share.

Overall, 36.9 million handsets were shipped in India during the second quarter of this year, up 9.9% from the same period last year, IDC reported. This was the highest volume of handsets ever shipped in India for Q2, the research firm said.

As smartphone shipments slow or decline in most of the world, India has emerged as an outlier that continues to show strong momentum as tens of millions of people purchase their first handset in the country each quarter.

Research firm Counterpoint told TechCrunch that there are about 450 million smartphone users in India, up from about 350 million late last year and 300 million in late 2017. This growth has made India, home to more than 1.3 billion people, the fastest growing market worldwide.

Globally, meanwhile, smartphone shipments declined by 2.3% year-over-year in Q2 2019, according to IDC.

Chinese phone makers Vivo and Oppo, both of which spent lavishly in marketing during the recent local favorite cricket season in India, also expanded their base in the country. Vivo had 15.1% of the local market share, up from 12.6% in Q2 2018, while Oppo’s share grew from 7.6% to 9.7% during the same period. The market share of Realme, which has gained following after it started to replicate some of Xiaomi’s early model, also shot up, moving from 1.2% in Q2 2018 to 7.7% in Q2 2019.

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Samsung showroom demonstrator seen showing the features of new S10 Smartphone during the launching ceremony. (Photo by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The key to gaining market share in India has remained unchanged over the years: better specs at lower prices. The average selling price of a handset during the Q2 was $159 in the quarter that ended in June this year. Seventy-eight percent of the 36.9 million phones that shipped in India sported a sticker price below $200, IDC said.

That’s not to say that phones priced above $200 don’t have a market in India. Per IDC, the fastest growing smartphone segment in the nation was priced between $200 to $300, witnessing a 105.2% growth over the same period last year.

Smartphones priced between $400 and $600 were the second-fastest growing segment in the country, with a 16.1% growth since the same period last year. Chinese phone maker OnePlus assumed 63.6% of this premium segment, followed by Apple (which has less than a 2% market share) and Samsung.

Feature phones that have maintained a crucial position in India’s handsets market continue to maintain their significant footprint, though their popularity is beginning to wane. 32.4 million feature phones shipped in India during Q2 this year, down 26.3% since the same period last year.

India has become Xiaomi’s biggest market. It entered the country five years ago, and for the first two, relied mostly on selling handsets online to cut overhead. But the company has since established and expanded its presence in the brick and mortar market, which continues to account for much of the sales in the country.

Earlier this month, the Chinese phone maker said it has set up its 2,000th Mi Home store in India. It is on track to have presence in 10,000 physical stores in the country by end of the year, and expects to see half of its sales come from the offline market by that time frame.

Samsung has stepped up its game in India in last two years, as well. The company, which opened the world’s largest phone factory in the country last year, has ramped up productions of Galaxy A series of smartphones that are aimed at budget conscious customers and conceptualized a similar series that includes Galaxy M10, M20, and M30 smartphone models for the Indian market. The Galaxy A series handsets drove much of the growth for the company, IDC said.

Even as it lags behind Xiaomi, Samsung shipped more handsets in Q2 2019 compared to Q2 2018 (9.3 million vs 8 million) and its market share grew from 23.9% to 25.3% during the same period.

“The vendor was also offering attractive channel schemes to clear the stocks of Galaxy J series. Galaxy M series (exclusive online till the end of 2Q19) saw price reductions which helped retain the 13.5% market share in the online channel in 2Q19 for Samsung,” IDC said.

But the South Korean giant continues to have a tough time passing Xiaomi, which continues to maintain low profit margins (Xiaomi says it only makes 5% profit on any hardware it sells). Xiaomi has also expanded its local production efforts in India and created more than 10,000 jobs in the country, more than 90% percent of which have been filled by women.

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Samsung shuts down its AI-powered Mall shopping app in India

Samsung has quietly discontinued an app that it built specifically for India, one of its largest markets and where it houses a humongous research and development team. The AI-powered Android app, called Samsung Mall, was positioned to help users identify objects around them and locate it on shopping sites to make the purchase.

The company has shut down the app a year and a half after its launch. Samsung Mall was exclusively available for select company handsets and was launched alongside the Galaxy On7 Prime smartphone. News blog TizenHelp was first to report about the development.

At the time of the launch, Samsung said the Mall app will complement features of Bixby, the company’s virtual assistant. Bixby already offers a functionality that allows users to identify objects through photos — but does let them make the purchase.

“The first insight while developing Samsung Mall was that consumers may be looking to find the price, the colour, delivery options and a lot of other things. Indian consumers want to find the best deals first. They aren’t tied up with one particular portal as well,” Sanjay Razdan, Director of Samsung India told local outlet India Today at the time of the launch.

Samsung had partnered with Amazon, Shopclues and TataCLiQ to show relevant results from these retailers on its “one-stop online experience” app. Users were also able to compare prices to see which website was offering them the item at lowest cost.

Samsung Mall app was downloaded about five million times from Google Play Store in India since March 2018, Randy Nelson, Head of Mobile Insights at analytics firm SensorTower told TechCrunch. The app had begun to lose its popularity in recent months, though.

“Downloads in May totaled 275,000 — which was down 38% year-over-year from 476,000 in May 2018. It was ranked No. 1,055 by downloads in India’s Google Play store in May — down from 487 a year ago,” said Nelson.

Once the top smartphone vendor in India, Samsung has lost that crown to Xiaomi. The Chinese smartphone maker has held the tentpole position in India for two straight years now, according to research firm IDC.

A Samsung spokesperson in India, reached out by TechCrunch on Monday, has yet to comment on the story.

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Xiaomi’s new Mi CC brand will develop ‘trendy’ smartphones for young people

Huawei may be on the ropes as it battles sanctions from the U.S. government, but fellow Chinese smartphone rival Xiaomi is in expansion mode with the launch of a new brand that’s aimed at winning friends (and sales) among the young and fashionable.

“Mi CC” is the newest brand from Xiaomi. Unveiled on Friday, the phone-maker said it stands for “camera+camera” in reference to its dual-camera feature, but that apparently also segues into “a variety of meanings including chic, cool, colorful and creative.”

The end goal of that marketing bumf is a target customer that Xiaomi describes as “the global young generation.”

Essentially, what Xiaomi is doing here is breaking out a dedicated set of phones for those who care more about aesthetics than performance. To date, the company has built its brand on developing phones that are as good — well, nearly as good — as top smartphone rivals but at a fraction of the cost. The result of that is that a lot of marketing focus is on the technical details, even though Xiaomi has been lauded for some attractive designs, and CC adjusts that balance to target a different kind of audience.

Since Xiaomi has a history of bringing innovation into affordable devices, CC is one to watch out for.

Xiaomi’s CC teaser image doesn’t give much away, apart from the logo

The new division is the result of Xiaomi’s acquisition of the smartphone business belonging to Meitu, a selfie app maker.

Xiaomi bought the business last November to go after new demographics and build on the work of Meitu, which had sold just over 3.5 million after getting into the smartphone business in 2013. Those numbers weren’t enough to justify the continuation of Meitu’s phone business but, evidently, Xiaomi saw promise in that segment. Meitu retains a similarly positive outlook on the fashionable audience and it has a lot to gain financially from the success of CC, too.

Terms of the acquisition deal mean that Meitu will take 10 percent of all profits, with a minimum guaranteed fee of $10 million per year. Big sales could be significant for Meitu, which reported revenue of $406 million in 2018. Notably, two-thirds of that income was from phone sales but Meitu’s smartphone revenue dropped by 51 percent year-on-year. Hence, Xiaomi has come to the rescue with its know-how.

There’s no word on exactly what Mi CC devices will look like or where they will be sold, but Xiaomi is already trumpeting its differentiation.

“Mi CC is created by one of the youngest product teams in Xiaomi, among which half are art majors and are dedicated to creating a trendy design for young consumers,” it wrote in an announcement.

Gavin Thomas plays with a Mi CC phone in a teaser that the brand posted to its Weibo account

The first look is a teaser that features Gavin Thomas — an eight-year-old who went viral in China for his ability to speak Mandarin — but the phone itself is kept hidden in the video thanks to well-placed stickers.

As you’d expect from Meitu, there’s a lot of emphasis on selfies, stickers and other graphics.

Xiaomi has had success with brands, some of which include Redmi — its big-selling budget division — Poco, its ‘performance’-focused division, its gaming brand Shark, which looks much like Razer’s phones.

Outside of mobile, the company develops and sells a range of smart home products, many of which are licensed from third-party partners.

Smart TVs add fuel to Xiaomi’s Q1 earnings

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Xiaomi’s latest products for Russia include its smart TVs and flagship Mi 9T

Xiaomi, best known for its smartphones, is making serious inroads into Russia as it launched a collection of products in the country where some 145 million people live. That includes its smart TVs featuring 700,000 hours of content, smart wristbands, wireless earbuds, and flagship phone Mi 9T, which is identical to its recently announced Redmi K20 for China under a different identifier.

Customers can find these products online on Xiaomi’s website and offline at its 31 authorized retail stores across the country. Xiaomi aims to boost the number of Mi Stores to 100 this year, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. Russian news outlet Kommersant first reported the plan last week.

Xiaomi began shipping to Russia back in 2017 by introducing three handset models and its offering has since broadened. Russia marks the third international country following India and Indonesia — its biggest markets outside China — where it has rolled out smart TVs, a new area of growth for the Hong Kong-listed company.

The three Mi TV models will be available from June 25th with prices ranging from 11,990 rubles ($186.56) to 33,990 rubles ($528.88).

The TV push comes as Xiaomi copes with a global slowdown in smartphone shipment. TVs, like phones, can be an important channel for Xiaomi — which has long billed its software as a differentiator from conventional hardware companies — to sell app services and ads. It came as no surprise that Xiaomi recently bought a small stake in TCL, the world’s third-largest LCD TV maker, to ramp up its production capability in building next-gen connected TVs.

The expansion in Russia also reflects Xiaomi’s ambition to grow its overseas markets, which in the first quarter made up 38% of its overall revenue.

The three TV models it rolled out in the country “are a symbol of our sincere devotion to Russian consumers,” said Janet Zeng, vice president of international development at Xiaomi Mi TV. “I’m sure you all see how much we worked to combine our technical development and localized content. By [doing] this we emphasize our devotion to the Russian market and its priority for us.”

In major TV push, China’s Xiaomi buys 0.5% stake in TCL

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Alibaba proposes share split ahead of reported $20B Hong Kong IPO

Alibaba is being heavily linked with a public listing in Hong Kong, which could reportedly happen in Q3 and raise up to $20 billion. The firm is keeping quiet on those rumors, but it did let slip a major hint after it announced plans for a stock split.

Filings uploaded today (but originally released Friday) announced a proposal for a one-to-eight stock split.

Shareholders are invited to vote on the offer ahead of the company’s annual general meeting on July 15. The initiative has already been approved by Alibaba’s board, which is recommending that shareholders follow suit.

The particularly interesting part of the filing is where Alibaba explains the reasons behind the stock split.

“The Board of Directors is proposing the Share Subdivision to increase the flexibility for the Company in future capital market activities. Among other reasons, the one-to-eight share subdivision will increase the number of shares available for issuance at a lower per share price, and the Board of Directors believes that this will increase flexibility in the Company’s capital raising activities, including the issuance of new shares,” the filing reads.

That would appear to clear the way for a second listing for the company, which went public in a record U.S. IPO that raised over $20 billion in 2014.

Alibaba declined to provide further comment when we asked.

Reports last week suggested that the Chinese e-commerce giant has already filed initial paperwork for the listing, which would become the largest such float on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The city has become a destination for Chinese tech IPOs since relaxed listing rules came into effect two years ago. Ironically, a lack of flexibility was cited as a key reason why Alibaba picked the U.S. over Hong Kong for its 2014 listing.

Tech firms that have gone public in Hong Kong include Razer, Xiaomi, Tencent’s China Literature and selfie app company Meitu. Despite the hype, some have been guarded of Hong Kong’s suitability for tech firms, which are often not profitable when listing. Indeed, Razer CEO Min Liang Tan previously warned that “the U.S. [public markets] are probably more cognizant of tech companies” than Hong Kong retail investors.