Hugo Barra leaves Xiaomi and will return to Silicon Valley

VP of International Hugo Barra announced on Facebook that he’ll be leaving Xiaomi and returning to Silicon Valley. Barra, who became a popular figure in the company both at home in Beijing and abroad, was a star at Google’s Android division prior to his tenure at Xiaomi. He called his time at the Chinese company “the greatest and most challenging adventure of my life,” and said he feels he’s leaving it in a “good place on its global expansion path. At the same time, he said that “living in such a singular environment has taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health.”

When Barra took the reins of Xiaomi in August 2013, it was a rapidly growing “rockstar” smartphone company, as he put it. To give you an idea of its trajectory during that period, it sold 7.5 million smartphones in 2012 and just two years later in 2014, 61 million. However, CEO Lei Jun recently admitted that such growth was too rapid and unsustainable. “In the first few years, we pushed ahead too fast. We created a miracle, but also drew on some long-term growth,” Lei said last week.

Despite its success in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, Xiaomi still doesn’t have a large presence in the US, other than selling its Mi Box online. However Barra recently told Engadget that the company has started testing phones, including a special version of the Mi5 and Mi Note 2 to assure that meet tough carrier and FCC standards stateside. So far, the only way to get a device has been to import one, and then it’s not guaranteed to work on US networks, especially LTE.

Barra played a big part in that success — he was omnipresent at Xiaomi events abroad and was a popular face of the product in China. He said that CEO Lei Jun has “been very supportive of my transition and has asked me to remain an advisor to Xiaomi indefinitely.” He didn’t elaborate on what he’d be doing next, but said he’d be “transitioning out of my role at Xiaomi in February after Chinese New Year,” then taking time off before “embarking on a new adventure back in Silicon Valley.”

Source: Hugo Barra (Facebook)