Meitu is the China-based technology company which is known for its expertise in the camera-centric apps. It is one very first companies to bet big on selfie revolution. It owns several selfie and beauty apps which are immensely popular in China. While the company also sells Meitu branded smartphones, it never took off in a big way. After the success of its camera apps, the company started selling smartphones in China.
However, it never took off in a grand way. While the company offered the best selfie cameras on a smartphone, it always catered to a small niche of younger customers whose priority is just taking selfies. Even though its photo-beautification apps are popular worldwide, the company suffered huge losses. The company never took its hardware business as its first priority, but the continuous loses seem to have changed their minds.
Meitu has announced a strategic partnership with the popular smartphone maker Xiaomi. With this deal, Xiaomi will be selling Meitu-branded smartphones and also gets the several camera patents owned by Meitu. The widespread market reach of Xiaomi will also boost the sales of Meitu smartphones. Initially, Xiaomi will be paying a percentage of phone profits to Meitu. After five years or selling certain smartphone units, the company will be paying a flat per-phone licensing fees.
It’s interesting that Xiaomi earlier announced that its profit margin from hardware business will be limited to just 5%. Apart from selling smartphones, Xiaomi will also gets rights to use patented imaging technology and beauty algorithms from Meitu. While the MIUI on Xiaomi phones already comes with several in-house freemium apps with ads, we might soon see Meitu apps coming preloaded too.