The company is huge in some markets, such as Europe, China, and India. It doesn’t exactly have such a presence in the US, not even close, especially in the smartphone segment. That may change in the future, but for the time being, many US consumers don’t have a grasp as to how large Xiaomi is.
Xiaomi decided to ditch ‘Mi’ branding for some reason
Well, this tech giant is getting ready for a rather monumental change. Xiaomi has been using its ‘Mi’ branding for over a decade. Basically from the get-go. Its very first (flagship) smartphone was called the Xiaomi Mi 1, and was released in 2011. Since then, Xiaomi announced a lot of ‘Mi’ phones. The ‘Mi’ branding became a synonym for Xiaomi. That’s about to change, as the company is ditching the ‘Mi’ branding. So, the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 12, which is expected to arrive in December this year, or January next year, will likely be called the ‘Xiaomi 12’. Xiaomi silently started to make this change with the recently-announced MIX 4 handset. That is the company’s new high-end device, and it didn’t have ‘Mi’ branding at launch. Very few people noticed it, and Xiaomi didn’t really mention it either.
The change started with the Xiaomi MIX 4, but it will spread to other products
Well, Xiaomi’s representative did just confirm to XDA Developers that this change wasn’t accidental, and that it’s here to stay. It said that the company’s upcoming products will follow in MIX 4’s footsteps. Smartphones are not the only products that bear the ‘Mi’ branding when it comes to Xiaomi. Many other products do, including laptops, refrigerators, air fryers, scooters, and so on. Well, all of them will lose that branding, it would seem. For those of you who didn’t know, ‘Mi’ stands for ‘Mobile Internet’ and ‘Mission Impossible’, according to Xiaomi’s CEO. Unfortunately, we did not get a more detailed explanation as to why ‘Mi’ is going away. It is, however, possible that Xiaomi wants its customers to associate its products with its name alone from this point on. Many did, despite the ‘Mi’ branding, pretty much everyone. Many actually thought that ‘Mi’ stands for ‘Xiaomi’ directly. Well, perhaps Xiaomi plans to offer a more detailed explanation down the road. For the time being, however, we can only guess.