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Chinese tech firms including Xiaomi, Oppo fear Ukraine operations could become casualty of Russian invasion
- Chinese brands are being forced to rethink planned product launches and promotions in Ukraine, where Xiaomi is the top smartphone brand
- Technology firms also face an increasingly complicated situation in Russia once sanctions from Washington and Brussels kick in
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A number of Chinese tech giants could become casualties of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, which has disrupted business activities and put the country at risk of more economic turmoil amid sanctions from the West.
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Beijing-based smartphone maker Xiaomi is the latest to get hit by the disruption caused by the Russian invasion. A product launch scheduled for Thursday in Ukraine was cancelled this week. The event was meant to unveil the Redmi Note 1, according to a post to the company’s official Facebook page, which was later deleted.
Xiaomi also removed a post on the microblogging platform Weibo, where the gadget maker’s head of international marketing Zang Zhiyuan said there “would have” been a phone launch in Ukraine.
Xiaomi did not not respond to a request for comment.
The cancelled product launch in the market of 44 million people is a small casualty for business operations, but Xiaomi and other Chinese handset makers like Oppo have been growing in the country since Washington’s sanctions on Huawei Technologies all but killed the once-dominant brand’s overseas smartphone sales.
Xiaomi is the top smartphone brand in Ukraine, where it entered in 2016, making up 45 per cent of shipments in the third quarter, far ahead of Samsung at 28 per cent, according to market research firm Canalys. The smartphone brand was in second place in Russia that quarter, behind Samsung, with 26 per cent of shipments in the market of 144 million people, according to IDC.
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Shenzhen-based Oppo, a Xiaomi rival, ranked third in Ukraine, with 6 per cent of smartphone shipments. Earlier this week, the company was advertising an upcoming price cut in March for the Oppo A55. Oppo did not respond to a request for comment on its operations in Ukraine.
Beijing-based ByteDance was also put in an awkward situation last weekend when its short video app TikTok briefly froze the account of Russian state media RIA Novosti and removed the video of a local leader calling for the evacuation of a separatist region of Ukraine. Both were restored a day later, according to Sputnik International, which is owned by RIA parent company Rossiya Segodnya. TikTok has previously been caught up in controversies regarding the censorship of videos critical of China.
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