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News reaching around tech giant Xomia
Hugo Barra, the person tasked with expanding Xiaomi's reach beyond its
native China, has today announced his departure from the post. He will
conclude his Xiaomi tenure after the Chinese New Year next month, and
will return to Silicon Valley — where he served as Google's vice
president of Android product management until 2013— to "embark on a
new adventure." Barra says that his decision has been strongly
motivated by a feeling of detachment from his family and the life he
had built up in Silicon Valley:
"What I've realized is that the last few years of living in such a
singular environment have taken a huge toll on my life and started
affecting my health. My friends, what I consider to be my home, and my
life are back in Silicon Valley,…
"What I've realized is that the last few
years of living in such a singular
environment have taken a huge toll on
my life and started affecting my health.
My friends, what I consider to be my
home, and my life are back in Silicon
Valley, which is also much closer to
my family. Seeing how much I've left
behind these past few years, it is clear
to me that the time has come to
return."
In his time at Xiaomi, Barra did a lot to raise
the company's global profile and
respectability. When he first arrived, Xiaomi
was widely derided as a cynical Apple
copycat, but in the three and a half years that
have followed, the Chinese company has
asserted its own design credentials , and last
year it introduced one of the most
impressively futuristic new devices in its Mi
Mix smartphone. Barra will be succeeded by
Xiang Wang, who's already a senior vice
president at Xiaomi, in the role of stewarding
the company's international expansion efforts.
While Xiaomi's international presence has
been improving, its performance at home in
China has been steadily declining. Having
once been the darling of the Chinese
smartphone market, Xiaomi dropped out of
the top five smartphone vendors in 2016 , and
it didn't even register a mention in IDC's latest
market share numbers . So while Barra puts
the cause of his resignation down to a sense
of homesickness, it's also inarguable that
Xiaomi has struggled to live up to its
ambitious goals.
The arrival of Hugo Barra in Beijing back in
2013 was a major story because of how
senior he was within Google's Android team
and the relatively unproven company he was
leaving that position for. It was a sign of faith
in the growing importance of China and its
local phone makers to the future of the
mobile industry, and it gave Xiaomi an easily
recognizable ambassador in the West. But
Barra was no doubt also frustrated in his
efforts, having launched the Xiaomi Mi 5 at
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year
and a new Xiaomi TV at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year
without any plans to distribute those products
in Western markets.
