Xiaomi, Meitu come together to build selfie-centric smartphones

Chinese electronics major Xiaomi have entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Meitu, Inc a mobile Internet company.

As a part of the deal, Xiaomi will receive an exclusive global licensing of the smartphone brand and a global licensing of image-related technologies and domain names in relation to all future Meitu branded smartphones (other than its V7 model) (the 'Cooperation Smartphones') and certain smart hardware products.

This cooperation mainly aims to integrate Meitu's advanced imaging technologies and its distinctive Meitu smartphone brand with Xiaomi's leading hardware and software experience and excellent supply chain and efficient new retail network.

"The strategic partnership opens up a broad range of possibilities to provide better user experience to users around the world," said Xiaomi Founder and CEO Lei Jun.

He said, "The Cooperation Smartphone business is set to create synergies to expand and diversify the user base and provide a new growth opportunity to Xiaomi's smartphone business."

Under the terms of the agreement, the Chinese smartphone maker will be responsible for the design, research and development, production, business operation, sales, and marketing of future generations of the Cooperation Smartphones.

In addition, Xiaomi is also granted the exclusive license to use the Meitu brand in relation to a range of smart hardware products, with the exception of certain skin-related smart hardware products.

Furthermore, Meitu will provide its proprietary imaging technologies and beautification algorithms to Xiaomi for future Cooperation Smartphone camera in areas that include, but are not limited to: image enhancement, human pose estimation, image restoration, smart retouching, image segmentation, facial detection, and facial landmark detection.

As we look ahead and evaluate our strategy of continuing to grow our user base, we realize that working with a partner who has a scalable smartphone business will significantly accelerate the process of putting Cooperation Smartphones into the hands of more users,' said Meitu Chairman Cai Wensheng. 'We believe Xiaomi is the perfect partner because it is currently one of the world's largest smartphone brands. It has also established itself as the world's largest consumer IoT platform.'

Xiaomi has over 132 million smart hardware devices connected to its IoT platform, excluding smartphones and laptops. It's 2018 smartphone shipment has exceeded 100 million smartphones by end of October 2018.