Google phone exec quits for Chinese upstart Xiaomi

Story originally appeared on USA Today.

Hugo Barra, a top member of Google's smartphone team, is leaving the U.S. technology company for upstart Chinese phone maker Xiaomi.

Barra, vice president of product management for Google's Android phone operating system, will head up the Chinese company's international business development as vice president of Xiaomi Global, he announced on his Google+ page.

Xiaomi currently sells few phones outside of China, but has quickly carved out an impressive share of the world's largest cell phone market, surpassing Apple in sales in the last quarter and, with its Mi 2S model, taking the title of top selling phone away from Samsung Electronics's Galaxy S4 in the first half of the year.

Part of the attraction is that Xiaomi's phones are usually priced at less than half the level of the leading global models, but the company actively involves customers in its design process through social media to keep up with their changing tastes.

Barra has been with Google for over 5 years and joins a group of Chinese Google, Microsoft and Motorola veterans in guiding Xiaomi's expansion. While Chinese phone makers lag well behind Samsung and its South Korean peers in the U.S. market, Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and others have already fared far better overseas than Japanese rivals other than Sony.

Xiaomi, whose investors include Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek, last week completed a new round of fundraising that valued the company at $10 billion according to Lei Jun, its chief executive. The company has made its mark through sales via social networking sites but this month began also selling phones through China Mobile, the company with the most mobile subscribers in the world and which has been wooed by Apple.

"Xiaomi looks a bit like Apple but is really more like Amazon with some elements of Google," Lei told Reuters earlier this month. "The mobile phone is only the carrier," he said, indicating the company's aim is to sell mobile Internet services.