The hottest smartphone maker in China wants to take over your entire home
But Xiaomi has made it clear that it intends to extend its reach far beyond the smartphone market, and its latest product further iterates that point.
The company just unveiled a new power strip, a new smart scale that relays your weight to your smartphone, and a new smart TV.
It's not necessarily a new move for Xiaomi - the company announced a strategy to make smart home products back in October and has previously released smart power plugs and web cams.
But it's the way Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun described a seemingly mundane product like the new power strip that shows the company is taking its accessories just as seriously as its smartphones.
Here's what Jun said about its power strip, according to The Wall Street Journal:
After you take apart and look at the insides of all these other power strips, doesn't ours look like art? It's so neatly arrayed. What if all products were so beautiful? This may look simple, but it was really hard to design. The components were custom-made so we could make the device smaller. We spent so much time thinking about how many USB ports to include. We finally decided the right number was three. I believe Xiaomi's power strip will make the entire country's power strip industry follow us.
Why does Jun care so much about a power strip? Because the idea is that eventually, Xiaomi's power strip would be used to power your entire home. The Journal's Eva Dou explains it well:
Far from content just being the biggest smartphone vendor in China, Xiaomi wants to take over users' entire home, where everything down to the power strips to light bulbs are Mi-made.
It also provides another example of how strong Xiaomi's brand is - if Lei Jun can get crowds excited about a power strip, imagine how he'll be able to position the company's upcoming phones and other home products.
We're bound to hear more about Xiaomi soon, as the company will be bringing some of its products to the US in the near future.