Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced this morning (via Weibo) that the company has completed its latest round of funding, securing another $1.1 billion for the startup to now be valued at $45 billion total. And in light of this news, the Chinese company has mentioned that it plans to announce its next flagship device at some point next month.
This sum comes from All-Star Investment, DST, GIC, Hopu Fund, Yunfeng Capital and others according to the company’s Twitter account. “This is affirmation of the company’s stellar results in the four years, and heralds in a new phase for the company,” the announcement says.
Sadly, we don’t have much information on what the next device is going to look like nor what kind of hardware specifications it will pack. With the Mi 4 announced in July of this year, it seems somewhat unlikely that we’ll see a “Mi 5” just six months later. But there are other lines of phones that could possibly see a refresh, such as the Redmi Note (which saw its original announcement in March of this year).
All of today’s news comes following a report from Reuters a couple of weeks ago that the company saw a $56 million profit in 2013 despite its razor-thin margins. In October, the company officially took LG’s spot to be the third largest smartphone maker in the world.
That same day, Gartner released its third quarter numbers for 2014, showing that the Chinese company continues to have explosive growth in emerging markets. Xiaomi only sold 16 million smartphones in Q3 2014 (accounting for just 5.2% market share), but year-over-year the company is up 4 percentage points over 2013, when it sold only 3.6 million units. The company also for the first time landed a spot in the top 5 smartphone manufacturers in that same report.
A brand new phase for Mi! Any guesses what our next flagship device will be? ;) pic.twitter.com/ZPzwiRBVk5
— Xiaomi (@Xiaomi) December 29, 2014
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