Yuri Milner, a Russian investor worth roughly $2 billion, believes Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi will eventually become a $100 billion company, Business Insider Australia said.
Xiaomi was most recently valued at around $45 billion after raising over $1 billion earlier this month.
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In an interview with Bloomberg, Milner said Xiaomi’s unprecedented growth rate makes him believe the smartphone maker will get to that valuation soon.
“I don’t think there’s any company that has reached $1 billion in revenue as fast as Xiaomi. In every conceivable benchmark, it’s almost unprecedented in terms of its speed of growth, ” Milner said.
He explained Xiaomi’s global reach, spanning Asian markets like India and Malaysia to emerging countries like Brazil and Turkey, as well as its diverse product offerings including smartphones, tablets, and TVs could make it China’s “first global consumer brand.”
“Xiaomi can take significant market share globally, but that doesn’t cover the whole opportunity. There are a number of other interesting categories that Xiaomi can target, ” he said.
Of course, Milner is one of the early investors in Xiaomi. His investment firm Digital Sky Technologies first invested in the smartphone maker back in 2012, when it was valued at $US4 billion.
But it’s also worth noting that Milner has a successful track record of investing in companies like Facebook and Alibaba early on before they were worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He invested in Facebook in 2009, when it was a $10 billion company, and in Alibaba back in 2011, Business Insider said.
Then again, he also invested in Groupon, which was hailed as the fastest growing company in history when it was skyrocketing. He probably made money on that investment, but ultimately Groupon never reached the heights some thought it would, the report said.
Meanwhile, Beepi, the largest peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling used cars, collected $12.7 million worth of funding from Milner, Scott Bommer and AngeList, a hub for early-stage startup investments, NoCamels.com said.
