Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi enters Singapore

January 3, 2014 Leave a comment

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi enters Singapore

By Elaine Huang

The move by Xiaomi also means that the new office in the island nation could be the company’s headquarters for Southeast Asia

Much-watched Chinese smartphone manufacturer, Xiaomi, last month, hinted at plans to enter Southeast Asian cosmopolitan hub Singapore. Today, with an announcement from Hugo Barra, Vice President, Xiaomi Global, and a Facebook brand page, the firm has started its campaign to launch products in the city-state. This move into Singapore and Barra’s interest in the Southeast Asian market, as inferred from his statements at a press conference in Taiwan, also means the new office in the island nation could be the firm’s headquarters for Southeast Asia. At time of filing the report, the Facebook page for Xiaomi Singapore had already garnered 910 likes. The general sentiment on the page seems to lean towards ‘better late than never’.While it is exciting that Xiaomi will be launching its phones in Singapore and the rest of the region very soon, will it be able to grab a large chunk of the smartphone market pie? Let’s wait and watch.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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