Xiaomi

What Xiaomi is

Xiaomi describes itself as a consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company centred on three things: smartphones, smart hardware, and its AIoT platform, meaning artificial intelligence applied to connected devices ^[1]. That self-description is a useful starting point, because it explains why a company known for phones also turns up in conversations about home devices, wearables and, more recently, robots.

Origins and listing

Xiaomi was founded in April 2010. On 9 July 2018 it listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the stock code 1810.HK ^[1]. The listing gave the company a public market presence in Hong Kong alongside a business that, by its own account, reaches well beyond one market.

Scale

By the company's own figures, Xiaomi had 606 million global monthly active MIUI users as of June 2023 ^[1]. MIUI is the system software layer Xiaomi ships on its phones, so the figure is a rough measure of how many people use the company's software regularly.

Its AIoT platform, meanwhile, connected 655 million IoT devices as of 30 June 2023, a count that excludes smartphones, laptops and tablets ^[1]. What is being counted, then, is the everyday layer of connected objects rather than the phones themselves. Xiaomi also says its business has entered more than 100 countries and regions ^[1], and in August 2023 it said it had been included in the Fortune Global 500 for a fifth consecutive year ^[1].

Put together, the numbers describe the shape of the business: a phone at the centre of a person's digital life, and a ring of cheaper connected devices around it, managed through one account and one app. The AIoT platform is the part that ties those devices together; without it, the hardware would be a collection of separate gadgets.

Robots

Xiaomi's public robot work became visible with CyberDog, a quadruped robot. The product page describes it as the company's first step into robotics after 11 years of technology accumulation ^[2]. Alongside the product, Xiaomi said it would build a robot open-source community and set up a Xiaomi Robotics Lab ^[2] — an arrangement aimed at outside developers as much as at buyers.

The CyberDog page also shows how existing work was reused. It says Xiaomi applied technology from its phone cameras to robotics, including an AI interaction camera, a stereo ultra-wide camera and an Intel RealSense D450 depth module ^[2]. Vision hardware developed for phones is, in effect, repackaged as a robot's eyes.

In 2022 the company went further. During Lei Jun's annual speech that year, Xiaomi unveiled CyberOne, a full-size humanoid bionic robot ^[3]. A humanoid is a harder problem than a quadruped: standing, walking and interacting all place heavier demands on balance and control than a four-legged platform does.

Xiaomi Robotics also appears as a co-founder of a shared institution. According to People's Daily, the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center was jointly established by companies including UBTECH, Jingcheng Machinery and Xiaomi Robotics ^[4]. Such centres typically pool hardware, testing facilities and standards work that a single company would find expensive to build alone.

Where it sits

Xiaomi's position is unusual mainly in how wide it is: phones, smart hardware and an AIoT platform sit inside one company's account of itself ^[1]. The robotics work is presented as an early stage — the CyberDog page calls it a first step ^[2] — and consists of a quadruped product, a humanoid prototype shown at an annual speech ^[3], a lab and open-source community ^[2], and a share in a jointly founded innovation centre ^[4]. For a company whose main business is consumer electronics, the robots read as an extension of engineering already built at consumer scale.