Xiaomi is known primarily as a smartphone manufacturer / Xiaomi

Chinese Xiaomi, one of whose investors is Yuri Milner's DST Global, is considering entering the laptop market early next year, Bloomberg reported, citing its own sources. According to them, the company is opening a new front in the fight against Apple and Lenovo.

A Xiaomi laptop could go on sale in the first quarter and compete with premium laptops like Apple's MacBook Air and Lenovo's ThinkPad, Bloomberg reports. According to the agency, Xiaomi has held talks with Samsung Electronics on the supply of memory chips, and this initial agreement could be expanded to include the supply of displays. They believe the contract with Xiaomi will support Samsung's division that produces components for personal computers.

Xiaomi is best known as a smartphone maker. According to IDC, the company was the number one smartphone manufacturer in China in Q2 2015, with a 16.3% share. However, IDC also reported the first-ever decline in smartphone sales in China. While hopes for continued growth in China's smartphone market are fading, the news of the company's entry into a new market is coming at just the right time.

Xiaomi is the world's second-most valuable startup after Uber. It started in 2010 as a low-cost smartphone maker with competitive prices. During its last funding round in December 2014, the company was valued at $46 billion. In total, $1.4 billion had been invested in it.

Xiaomi expects total revenue of $16 billion in 2015. The company does not disclose information about its profitability. The Wall Street Journal wrote last year, citing documents reviewed by the newspaper's correspondents, that the net profit of the offshore company that controls Xiaomi's business in 2013 was 3.46 billion yuan ($559 million).

Materials from Bloomberg were used

Xiaomi to Get Into Computers