Xiaomi: Ringing In Success
When Manu Jain began his innings at Xiaomi India as its managing director way back in 2014, he operated from a compact, six-seater office in Bangalore with a very small team. In fact, in the beginning there was no one else in the office except him and he would happily do all the odd jobs from opening the office every morning to holding meetings with senior partners.
Four years later, the company has metamorphosed into a billion-dollar firm that operates from a 180,000 sq. ft office that houses 500-plus members. In the past two years, Xiaomi has grown exponentially and we have achieved various milestones.
“All this success has been built by a small team of Xiaomi which started with barely 20 people in 2014 and has gradually become 500-plus in 2018 and heavily supported by its Mi fan community in India. Xiaomi’s journey in India has been quite inspiring and the company has always focused to hire talent who share the passion for Xiaomi, and can help Xiaomi to retain the startup culture which is symbolic to Xiaomi,” says Jain.
Majority of Xiaomi’s workforce are millennials who are enthusiastic about the brand, working towards the common goal of making innovation available to everyone with products that feature cutting-edge technologies. This is supported by a unique business model (triathlon business model) that allows it to be one of the fastest growing consumer technology companies.
“Our aim to bring high quality, innovative products to everyone at incredibly honest prices has helped us earn the massive love and trust of millions of Mi fans and customers in India,” Jain adds.
Jain is Vice President of Xiaomi as well as Managing Director of Xiaomi India.
At Xiaomi, one of the key motivators is the company’s thriving work culture which embodies transparency and promotes entrepreneurial spirit. It promotes an entrepreneurial spirit wherein every employee owns his/her work, and enjoys the liberty to innovate.
“At Xiaomi, we not only promote professional development, but also encourage employees to seek a holistic sense of development. Hard work is sincerely rewarded wherein employees’ contributions towards the success of the brand is often highlighted by senior management. Furthermore, people are allowed the space to fail which helps them gain invaluable lessons and only makes for much stronger success in future. Xiaomi’s office culture has a flat structure with minimal hierarchy which allows for strong interpersonal relations between individuals irrespective of their roles, and thriving mentorship opportunities wherein employees can easily build meaningful bonds and gain productive learnings from their senior leaders, says Jain.
Xiaomi India recently opened all-new office in Bangalore (Xiaomi India headquarters) is specially designed to complement the company’s work culture.
“Our company aims to provide equal opportunity to all without any gender bias. We also believe in empowering women to participate fully in all fields across all sectors, which has allowed for several female members of our company to lead within several departments, and achieve promising career growth opportunities. Our factories in partnership with Foxconn employ over 10,000 members of which nearly 95 per cent are females and 100 per cent of the employees on the assembly line are also women,” says Jain.
Xiaomi is a benchmark today due to a three-pronged strategy of product portfolio management, price point adoption and multi-pronged distribution. The three brand ploy in smartphones of Mi, Redmi and Poco seems to have worked and driven the “pseudo smart” Indian brands like Micromax, etc. out of the mind-space altogether.
