A Billion Connected Things

Xiaomi began life as a maker of cheap smartphones. It is now something much larger and stranger: a company whose devices, phones, watches, appliances, robot vacuums, and now cars, talk to one another across a single connected ecosystem more than a billion units strong. By the end of 2025, Xiaomi’s AIoT platform linked over 1.07 billion devices, excluding phones, tablets and laptops, with more than 22 million users owning five or more of them.^[1]

The strategy has a name, “Human × Car × Home”, and a scale to match. Xiaomi’s 2025 revenue reached 457 billion yuan, up 25%, with its IoT and lifestyle products alone bringing in 123 billion.^[1] The most striking move up-market is the car: Xiaomi delivered more than 411,000 electric vehicles in 2025, and its YU7 SUV drew 289,000 orders in its first hour on sale, priced to undercut Tesla’s Model Y rather than the bargain bin.^[3][2]

The budget phone-maker now sells a premium car that out-orders Tesla in an hour, and every device it makes talks to the others.

Integration as the moat

The point is not any single product but the way they connect. A Xiaomi phone unlocks a Xiaomi car that talks to a Xiaomi home; each device makes the others more useful and harder to leave.^[2] This is the Apple playbook, ecosystem lock-in as the real moat, executed across a far wider range of hardware, and increasingly at the premium end where the margins live.

One honest caveat: Xiaomi does not publish a clean count of its ecosystem partner companies, so that oft-cited figure should be treated as unconfirmed; the connected-device and revenue numbers, from its own filings, are solid.

What it means for capital

Xiaomi is the fullest expression of Chinese consumer hardware growing up. It has climbed from disposable phones to premium electric cars, and bound the whole range together into an ecosystem that now rivals Apple’s in breadth if not yet in margin. For investors the significant thing is the integration: a billion connected devices and a credible premium car give Xiaomi a data-and-loyalty flywheel that no single-category rival can match, and a demonstration that a Chinese brand can move up-market without losing volume. We treat Xiaomi as the reference model for where Chinese hardware is heading, not cheaper gadgets, but connected, premium ecosystems, and as the clearest sign that the up-market migration is already well under way.