Xiaomi’s mobile phone shipment ranking has gone through another cycle in 10 years. Ten years ago in the second quarter of 2016, IDC released global smartphone shipment data. In the wave of offline channels, OPPO and vivo suddenly emerged. Xiaomi, which was at its peak at that time, together with Lenovo and TCL, fell out of the top five in China for the first time and was classified as "Others".
Ten years later, the script repeated itself. In the domestic smartphone market report for the first quarter of 2026 released by IDC, Huawei, Apple, OPPO, vivo and Honor occupy the top five seats. Xiaomi, which once dominated the domestic market and briefly returned to the top spot at the end of last year, disappeared from the list again and returned to the slightly embarrassing "Others" position.
Omdia's data is more intuitive. Xiaomi's domestic shipments in the first quarter were only 8.7 million units, a 35% year-on-year drop, making it the manufacturer with the heaviest loss among the top echelons.
Ten years of reincarnation, two falls. The failure in 2016 was because Xiaomi missed the dividends from offline channels. Today’s failure in 2026 is the price paid for the lack of absolute pricing power under pressure from the supply chain.
Before the IDC data was released, Omdia's report ranked Honor sixth, triggering a debate in the market about "who is the real Other?" Breaking out of this fan circle-style war of words, you will find that the situation facing Xiaomi is far more serious than the ranking battle.
In the first quarter, the main theme of the domestic market was "two strong players leading the way". Huawei returned to the top of the list with a 19.8% share, a year-on-year increase of 8.1%. Apple followed with a share of 18.9%, a year-on-year increase of 33.3%. OPPO and vivo stabilized their basic market with shares of 15.9% and 15.1% respectively.
Honor, ranked fifth, shipped approximately 8.9 million units, which is a very small gap compared to Xiaomi's 8.7 million units. Slight adjustments in statistical caliber are indeed enough to make the two positions interchangeable. But both Honor and Xiaomi have a clear gap between them and the top four with shipments exceeding 10 million.
From a global perspective, Xiaomi still ranks third in the world with shipments of 33.8 million units, and its huge overseas base has retained its dignity. However, in the Chinese base camp where competition is fierce, the 35% year-on-year plunge can be said to have basically announced the end of Xiaomi's ten consecutive quarters of growth myth.
This is not because consumers abandoned Xiaomi overnight, but because the cost of upstream components, especially memory chips, has soared, destroying Xiaomi's profit model.
Since the beginning of this year, global semiconductor and storage costs have continued to rise sharply. Changes in chip and memory prices directly determine the life and death of terminal manufacturers. In this round of price increases, Apple has demonstrated its professional supply chain control. Multiple media and institutions revealed that Apple purchased mobile DRAM in large quantities at high prices, almost wiping out the available production capacity on the market.
When upstream costs rise sharply, the first to be unable to bear it are naturally manufacturers that rely heavily on "cost-effectiveness" to drive volume. Among Xiaomi's sales, the mid-to-low-end brand Redmi is the absolute main force. Data shows that models priced below 3,000 yuan account for 72.8% of Xiaomi’s overall sales, and models priced below 4,000 yuan account for close to 80%. The inverted pyramid sales structure means that Xiaomi is extremely sensitive to changes in BOM material costs.
When the price of memory doubles, the "ultimate cost-effectiveness" model that once supported Redmi's dominance will become invalid in an instant. The more you sell, the more you lose.
Under cost pressure, brands such as OPPO and vivo successively issued price adjustment instructions in mid-March. Xiaomi struggled until April, and finally had to announce that the price of REDMI K90 Pro Max would be increased by 200 yuan, and the New Year special sale of the Turbo series would be cancelled.
Xiaomi, which finally raised prices, experienced the sharpest drop in shipments. This is not an accident, but Xiaomi's proactive strategic contraction between "killing share" and "maintaining profits". We will reduce the number of complete machine orders for the year and plan to close some inefficient and loss-making offline stores. There are various signs that in this cycle, Xiaomi’s senior management has to choose to “cut volume and maintain profits”.
What is exposed behind the forced price increase is Xiaomi's long-standing insufficiency in controlling its core pricing power in the process of high-endization.
Looking at the pricing model of the past ten years, Xiaomi's "rush" has been accompanied by continued price increases. Starting from Xiaomi 6, the starting prices of previous digital series have continued to rise. In 2020, the Xiaomi Mi 10 series will raise the starting price to 3,999 yuan. Last year’s Xiaomi 15 and this year’s Xiaomi 17 have stabilized the baseline at 4,499 yuan.
In contrast, Apple, which was once at the top, has maintained a stable price fixation. Since the iPhone 13 series, the starting price of its standard version has been anchored at 5,999 yuan for a long time. In 2011, the iPhone 4S was nearly 3,000 yuan more expensive than the Xiaomi Mi 1, which cost 1,999 yuan. Today, the price difference between the two has narrowed to 1,500 yuan.
As he advanced and retreated, the psychological space of the game was reversed. When the Android camp was forced to raise prices and cut discounts due to supply chain costs, Apple's stable pricing and deep brand premium highlighted an alternative "cost-effectiveness" in the high-end market. In the first quarter, Apple's domestic shipments surged 33.3%, which was the response to the high-end replacement demand lost due to the increase in Android prices.
Apple used its brand and price determination to block Xiaomi's room for further exploration. Huawei, below, used another method to penetrate Xiaomi's sales base.
As the only brand among domestic leading manufacturers that has not followed suit and raised prices, Huawei launched the Enjoy 90 series with a starting price of only 1,299 yuan in late March. At a time when costs are rising, Huawei has taken the initiative to let profits penetrate into the lower-end markets with the support of the group, completing the product puzzle from high-end to mid-to-low-end.
This move can be described as a dimensionality reduction blow to Redmi. When Redmi hesitated due to rising storage prices, Huawei took over the market vacuum it was forced to give up. Changxiang 90 Pro Max topped the sales list in the first week of its release, proving the power of brand dimensionality reduction in this hand-to-hand battle with the sinking market.
Upward, there is the ceiling that Apple is tightly welded to. Downward, Huawei takes advantage of the opportunity to attack the fundamentals. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the gross profit margin of Xiaomi's mobile phone business has dropped to 10.9%.
While the mobile phone business is under pressure, Xiaomi Group's financial statements still have many bright spots. The gross profit margin of the IoT and consumer products business, including major appliances, reached a record high of 23.1%, and the growth rate of white appliance products such as air conditioners and washing machines far exceeded the industry average. The channel is tilted towards major appliances, which has become an important means for Xiaomi's offline stores to hedge against the decline in mobile phone sales.
But as far as the core smartphone business is concerned, returning to "Others" once again made Xiaomi taste the pain.
Xiaomi's experience has made more people see that the so-called high-end, if it only stays at the parameter competition at the press conference and the one-way increase in price figures, and cannot establish a moat on the supply chain side that does not rely on the external environment, this kind of high-end is destined to lack resilience.
In ten years, the smartphone market has evolved from a horse race in the incremental era to a zero-sum game in the stock era. Xiaomi's proactive contraction this time is a pragmatic move to preserve profits. But after surviving this cold winter in the supply chain, how to truly build a core barrier that is not afraid of cyclical fluctuations and transform from a "parameter stacker" to a "rule setter" is the ultimate test that determines whether Xiaomi can break out of the "Others" and return to the throne.