With Huawei currently hitting some rather big stumbling blocks, competitors such as Xiaomi are smelling an opportunity. Today they’ve announced the launch of an R&D office in Tampere, Finland. It’s focused on the development of their latest smartphone cameras.
Xiaomi is growing quickly. The company is the youngest in the Fortune 500 and is now the world’s fourth largest smartphone brand. In Finland they will also be working on camera algorithms, machine learning, plus image and video processing.
Wang Xiang, Senior Vice President of Xiaomi, stated…
Our Tampere site is Xiaomi’s largest camera team outside of China. We are a compact team of around 20 people now, but we are quickly scaling up by building up this team. It’s all about empowering the teams and individuals to find solutions on their own. What we’re developing in Tampere will end up in the hands of hundreds of millions of users and Mi Fans around the world. That is really motivating.
The company is pushing hard. Not only do they make smartphones, but we’ve also reviewed their XEX Storm vacuum cleaner. Recently they’ve launched the Mi MIX Alpha, the Mi Mix 3 and the Mi 9.