In December 2018, Xiaomi spun-off its Redmi lineup of budget smartphones into an independent brand in China. Fast forward to 2020, POCO, which started as a sub-brand of Xiaomi in India, has also been now declared as an independent brand. The POCO brand, also known as Pocophone in Europe, has only launched one device so far and it is none other than the people’s favourite F1.
The POCO F1 made its debut in August 2018 and it became an instant success overnight, thanks to its price to performance ratio. It delivered everything a user needs in a smartphone at a very compelling price point of around Rs 20,000. When Redmi announced Redmi K20 series in the first half of 2019 in China, it was thought to be a Chinese version of POCO F2 and POCO F2 Lite. But that never happened and even the anniversary of POCO F1 passed just like that without any announcement from the company.
Excited to share: #POCO will now be an independent brand!
What started as a sub-brand within Xiaomi, has grown into its own identity. POCO F1 was an incredibly popular phone. We feel the time is right to let POCO operate on its own.
Join me in wishing @IndiaPOCO all the best.
— Manu Kumar Jain (@manukumarjain) January 17, 2020
Gizchina News of the week
But now, finally in 2020, as Alvin Tse, head of Pocophone Global teased last month, Manu Jain, the Managing Director of Xiaomi India took it to Twitter to announce the status of the brand. According to his tweet, POCO will be an independent brand hereafter and it will operate by itself. This move is similar to what Xiaomi has done with Redmi in its home country China.
Even Manu Jain, in his interview with Indian Youtuber Technical Guruji, said that POCO will return in a new avatar. This suggests we might see a different strategy from the newly formed independent brand. Probably, there might be multiple POCO-branded smartphones in 2020 across different price ranges and not the rumoured POCO F2 as expected.
In other news, even Redmi India’s social accounts have been updated with new profile picture with white background. Is Xiaomi India going to do the same with Redmi India as well since it has announced its plans to bring premium Mi series of smartphones to India again? Whereas, profile and cover pictures of the company’s social accounts have been replaced with a blank black colour picture. Maybe, the brand will announce its new logo and identity soon.
