Xiaomi Penetrates the Laptop Market by Introducing Mi Notebook Air

A fortune 500 company in China, Xiaomi, which normally sells household items such as rice cookers and air purifiers, has entered the laptop market. Its Mi Notebook Air comes in two sizes, 12.5 and a larger mother ship model.

“The Chinese market for consumer notebooks is expected to contract by 10.4 percent this year, according to Bryan Ma, IDC’s vice president for devices research.”

The company is entering at a time where the laptop market is expected to drop 10.4 percent within just this year, according to Bryan Ma.

The announcement of the laptop happened when they launched a brand new phone, Redmi Pro, a dual rear-camera OLED phone. The company badly needed to launch a new product since their sales declined since the beginning of the year.

The company created a group of products under them called the “Mi Ecosystem” which will allow the younger crowd of teens to keep following their products that go along with their electronics such as Tv’s, to match throughout the household.

The key features of the 13.3-inch Mi Notebook Air are a Nvidia GeForce 940MX dedicated graphics card, Intel Core i5 processor, 256GB PCIe SSD with expandable SATA SSD slot, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The devices come in gold and silver colors.

The products go on sale in China next week, but with no plans to sell outside of the US. The company has had its sights on the U.S. market for some time, but is nervous about a standard strategy for established players to keep rivals out of the U.S. market.

Although Microsoft has recently agreed to transfer patens to Xiaomi, it also involved the bundling of Microsoft Office and Skype on their phones and tablets as well. Many consumers would even describe them as apple like, as well as their phone users who critique their product.