Xiaomi, the Chinese handset maker, recently announced it has hired Jai Mani to lead its product team in India.
Mani worked on Google+ and other products within Google. Last year, Xiaomi coaxed Hugo Barra, part of the Android team, to leave Google. Barra, who said he and Mani worked together closely at Google, played a role in bringing Mani to Xiaomi. “You can think of it as the beginning of our R&D center development in India,” said Barra to the Wall Street Journal.
“The first person we hired is someone who’s going to be the glue between our users in India, product feedback that we receive, and the engineering team we have in Beijing as well as the engineering team that we are going to be building fairly soon in India.” Mani will be based in Bangalore.
Xiaomi has already made significant progress against larger competitors such as Samsung in its home market of China, and has set its eyes on India as a place to grow further.
