However, after years, poor quality merit associations have begun to disturb the CEO, Lei Jun. Based on the question-and-answer session to TechNode, Xiaomi will probably raise prices for their upcoming smartphone products. This is implied by Lei Jun’s words who want to get rid of the cheap smartphone image that is attached to their products. “Actually, we want to get rid of the reputation that our products are worth less than 2,000 yuan (approx. N100,000 naira). We want to invest more and make better products,” he said. “I said internally that this might be the last time our price was under 3,000 yuan (approx. N160,000 naira). In the future, our smartphone might be more expensive. Not much, but a little more expensive,” Lei Jun continued. The smartphone he intended for 3,000 yuan is the Mi 9, and Xiaomi is the only vendor that maintains a low price tag in the midst of other vendors that are starting to rise in price. Even from vendors from China, they also do it, such as Huawei and OnePlus. This ideological change may no longer be a surprise. Because Xiaomi released the Redmi brand to stand alone as a brand that carries affordable smartphones. This is predicted from the start to make Xiaomi a more premium brand by making the price gap with Redmi wider. In addition, Xiaomi itself is still widely seen as an ‘imitation’ of Apple and Xiaomi wants to discard this perception by making its products more premium and original, which certainly requires a lot of allocations in a row of sectors, especially research and development, reports Trusted Review.
