Why Xiaomi is about to take over

sponsored by skillshare and i'll have a very special class to recommend at the end of this video hey happy friday this week i'll talk about xiaomi's big plan to take the place of huawei i'll talk about finally saying goodbye to lg phones and i'll also talk about every internet company in the world cloning clubhouse and this week a fantastic crowd user called josh offered to gift one brand new dji product to the community so we've teamed up with him and made a special drone themed quiz if you get at least 15 questions right you will not only get an invite to crowd but also the chance to win thanks josh details are in the description and welcome to the friday check out i think the most important releases this week by far were those coming from xiaomi who have announced five phones the me makes fold the 11 ultra and the 11 pro by far xiaomi's most expensive devices meant for actual consumers as well as two more affordable offerings in the form of the me 11i and the me 11 lite beside that the company also launched the mi band 6 and a bunch more random stuff including xiaomi's second ever chip called the surge c1 while this was originally rumored to be an soc it actually turned out to be a dedicated image signal processor a bit like how google uses its own pixel visual core in its phones beside that it was also the week of april fools and companies of course announced a ton of fake products including rgb shoes and hair dye and you can find the details on both the fake and the real releases in our release monitors in the description alright my first story of the week will be xiaomi's big mega launch event if you weren't aware this event lasted two full days and i've already told you all the products that they've announced but beside that i think the company also laid out a sort of long-term vision for the company that is really fascinating first xiaomi launched four new flagship phones which is on top of their existing regular me11 flagship and the redmi and poco flagships and while many of those are kind of just variations of each other the company now has more current flagships than many companies have phones even more surprising for me was that of those gazillion flagships three are around or above the magical 1000 usd mark with the ultra being right up there with samsung's galaxy s21 ultra now xiaomi has technically had expensive phones in the me mix series with its wildly experimental stuff in the past but those were never really mass market products and this year they went all in now you could kind of argue that xiaomi's phones are still sort of aggressively priced i mean the fold for example from xiaomi is still significantly cheaper than the fold from samsung or huawei but it's clear that the company is now going after the premium upper end market and that's kind of new because xiaomi's bread and butter used to be cheap mid-range phones that cost around 100 to 300 usd the last figures i could find shows xiaomi at just two percent of premium phone sales and here premium is defined as anything above 400 usd so in other words their flagship sales were practically irrelevant and the average selling price of xiaomi is so low that by revenue they typically don't even make it to the global top five despite selling way more phones than either oppo or vivo or even huawei by now flagship phones for xiaomi in the past were primarily about branding they were a way for the company to show to their consumers that hey we are an innovative tech company we can build really cool stuff and people would look at that and be impressed and then buy a 200 redmi phone but that is changing this year with the company launching multiple super high-end bets like gigantic custom image sensors or liquid lenses and so on and actually letting people buy those things and my guess is that a lot of this has to do with huawei huawei together with apple dominated the flagship segment in china until recently and the company also saw huge success in the last few years in europe but since that company literally can't buy any flagship processors anymore plus of course it has software issues too they have left a huge hole in the market that others including xiaomi are rushing to fail now moving a brand from budget to premium is a massive undertaking and even though in my opinion xiaomi has fantastic products now to back that up with i think they have a lot of work left to do in the branding department if they actually want to make it work huawei samsung oppo and co have spent billions over years to establish themselves as sophisticated premium lifestyle brands and it will be interesting to see how xiaomi will manage to take them on at this level also xiaomi has previously pledged to keep their margins on phones at five percent or below and it'll be fascinating to see if they can keep that going with the flagship phones as well because typically those require a lot more r d and a lot more marketing spending anyway my second story of the week will be a new report coming out of the korea times that says lg will officially announce pulling out of the smartphone business early next week we've had our first reports about two months ago that said lg was considering all options and back then the story was that they were considering selling or outsourcing more of their phone business to potential buyers but this new report suggests that potential buyers including vietnamese vin group apparently declined making the investment and lg found no real use for the unit so they are basically shutting the whole thing down now this is still a rumor but lg's phone business has been losing money every year since 2015 and despite multiple reorganizations their sales have been consistently going down and down and down so i would be sad but not surprised okay and my third story will be discord spotify and linkedin all announcing that they two are cloning clubhouse just like twitter and many others have done before and they too are integrating their own version of the live audio chat into their apps you probably know clubhouse by now it's like a big public video call where a few hosts that can talk about whatever they want can invite a few audience members to join live and pretty much all internet companies with a big community have decided that they too would just copy that feature on discord for example you can now just tap to create new channel and then you have the option to create a so-called stage channel and voila clubhouse in discord you can set people as hosts decide to let some of the listeners from the audience speak and so on and while most of the discussion seems to revolve around who is copying who i think the point here is that live audio is kind of a format and now that we know this format it makes sense to just integrate it into multiple apps just compare it with live video that's a format too and it makes sense to have dedicated platforms for it like twitch but it also makes sense to integrate it into other platforms such as youtube twitter or linkedin and i think the same thing will happen with live audio too i think it makes total sense that i would be able to host live audio conversations with my existing followers on twitter or with my existing community on discord instead of having to go to a whole separate app even more than that though i like the idea of further improving my youtube channel especially when the advice comes from this guy in the form of a step-by-step master class if you hadn't heard yet marcus just launched his first ever class on skillshare and it is exactly as great as you'd expect it to be scripting shooting editing how to pick the right camera angles how to arrange props in the background how to plan shoots how to keep your audience engaged how to think about growing your channel how to build a proper process so that you can churn out videos at a reasonable frequency it's just all there and i learned plenty from this class myself marquez is unsurprisingly a fantastic instructor and really if there is a single compact place to learn all the relevant skills this is it i've recently learned that my viewers have spent 14 000 hours on skillshare learning new stuff already and they have watched classes ranging from video editing photography ui ux creative writing marketing and more skillshare has thousands of fantastic classes to get you started with whatever you're interested in the first 1000 people to use my link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium and if you choose to keep it an annual membership is less than 10 bucks a month so check it out happy learning and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: The Friday Checkout

Views: 108,727

Rating: 4.9164157 out of 5

Keywords: TFC, The Friday Checkout, TechAltar, News, Tech, tech news, analysis, Xiaomi, mega launch, Mi 11 Ultra, Mi 11 Pro, Mi Mix Fold, Xiaomi foldable, Xiaomi flagships, Xiaomi premium phones, strategy, Huawei, taking over Huawei, LG, LG exit, Clubhouse, Discord, Stages, Linkedin

Id: 1g4FmhdXfPw

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021