Finance

Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi on Thursday claimed its new Xring O1 chip beat Apple’s version on a few metrics.
The new chip will be part of Xiaomi’s new 15S Pro phone, priced below the Apple iPhone 16 Pro in China.
Xiaomi also revealed its YU7 electric SUV.

Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi is developing its own chip called Xring O1.
Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi is taking on Apple’s iPhone with an advanced chip and a cheaper phone.
Xiaomi is winning the battle on the pricing of its latest phone. The new Xiaomi 15S Pro starts at 5,499 yuan ($764) — making it eligible for a state-subsidized discount — and is significantly cheaper than Apple models containing the company’s most advanced phone chip. The iPhone 16 Pro starts at 7,999 yuan, while the iPhone Pro Max model begins at 9,999 yuan — above the 6,000 yuan cut-off for a Chinese government discount for consumers.

And Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun claims his company also has a competitive chip, saying at a launch event on Thursday that Xiaomi’s new Xring O1 beat Apple’s A18 Pro on several technical metrics, including the ability to operate a game with less heat.
CNBC has not independently verified these claims. CNBC has reached out to Apple for comment.
“Apple is still number one,” Lei said in Mandarin, according to a CNBC translation. He said the Xring O1’s performance should not be seen as an attempt to pressure Apple, but rather as an indicator of the great effort Xiaomi made to develop a comparable processor.
The U.S. has increasingly restricted China’s ability to access high-end equipment for developing advanced semiconductors used in training artificial intelligence models.
Lei did not discuss any significant AI features for the 15S Pro, but showed how it could be used to lock and unlock a compatible car.

He announced that Xiaomi will spend 200 billion yuan on research and development in the next five years, starting from 2026, and predicted 30% revenue growth this year.
Lei had teased the 3 nanometer chip last week on Chinese social media app Weibo. He later noted the chip is in mass production and said the company would invest at least 50 billion yuan ($6.9 billion) over the next 10 years in its own chip development.
Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max use A18 Pro chips built on the same 3 nanometer process.Around 40% of Xiaomi’s phones currently use chips by Qualcomm and MediaTek, according to Counterpoint Research Partner Niel Shah.
Xiaomi spent 13.5 billion ($1.87 billion) over four years to develop the Xring O1, Lei said in a social media post. He revealed that the company started developing chips in 2014 and unveiled one in 2017, before temporarily suspending such research.
Last spring, Xiaomi launched its first electric car, the SU7 sedan, with a price $4,000 below that of Tesla’s Model 3 at the time. Ford CEO Jim Farley said he spent months driving a Xiaomi electric car, as he tried to assess competition from Chinese automakers.
Xiaomi’s first SUV, called the YU7, will be officially released in July, Lei said in a social media post, noting the car’s price wouldn’t be revealed Thursday. Lei did share some promotional images and car features at the event.
Lei said the YU7 car would use Qualcomm Snapdragon and Nvidia Thor chips. The standard version of the vehicle will come with advanced driver assist and a driving range of 835 km.
The company delivered more than 28,000 vehicles in April, down from its record of more than 29,000 during the previous month. That comes after the crash of an SU7 vehicle in China, which left three people dead. China has since required automakers to use more conservative language when advertising driver-assist systems.
Xiaomi is set to release its first-quarter results on May 27, after the company in March reported record revenue and net profit for 2024. Sales generated from overseas markets last year accounted for nearly 42% of total revenue.
The company’s shares remain more than 50% higher year-to-date.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal and Bernice Ooi contributed to this report. More

David Webb was quick to get his hands on the ZX Spectrum or “Speccy”, a computer launched in 1982 with up to 48 kilobytes of memory and rubber keys. Before he turned 18, he had written a book, “Supercharge Your Spectrum”, showing how to get the most out of the contraption with his favourite machine-code tricks and techniques. What set him apart from other tinkerers was how he spent the royalties. He would cycle to his bank in Oxford to place an order in London for some shares. (“Which stock, young man, do you want to buy?”) More

When the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issues a statement, it is often to celebrate a Nobel Prize. In the past decade, six of its professors have won the award—as many as the next two universities combined. But on May 16th it issued a different sort of press release: one disavowing research by a high-flying graduate student. More

Newspapers across America are filled with tales of woe. In Texas fashion designers stay up at night worrying about “economic uncertainty”. In Maine the boss of a brewery complains about “rapid and massive fluctuations every single day on the tariffs”. In Washington state, border levies are “shaking up Skagit Valley farmers—spiking input costs, stalling sales, and fuelling uncertainty from fields to food banks”. More

“Serena Williams, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry.” When it comes to making sure the world’s biggest bank is a lean operation, Jamie Dimon takes athletic inspiration. “Look how they train, what they do to be that good,” says the boss of JPMorgan Chase. “Very often, senior leadership teams, they lose that. Companies become very inward-looking, dominated by staff, which is a form of bureaucracy.” More

One of the best things about living in Europe is America. Faced with a moribund domestic stockmarket, European investors can redirect their savings into the s&p 500. Residents enjoy the protection of America’s security umbrella without having to foot the bill. At times of crisis the continent’s central banks rely on swap lines from the Federal Reserve. All the while they enjoy better food, nicer cities and superior cultural offerings. More

Shanghai-based Bc Babycare says it expects its supply chain diversification and the U.S. market potential to more than offset the impact of ongoing U.S.-China trade tensions.
Baby gear is particularly sensitive to tariffs since the majority of those sold in the U.S. are made in China, said U.S.-based Newell Brands, which owns stroller company Graco.
Bc Babycare’s U.S. market ambitions reflect how large U.S. and European multinationals not only face growing competition in China, but also in their home markets.

U.S. births rose by 1% in 2024, with 3.6 million births recorded for the year, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 26: A woman pushes a stroller while walking along the La Jolla coastline at sunset on October, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)Kevin Carter | Getty Images News | Getty Images

BEIJING — One Chinese baby products company announced Tuesday it is officially entering the United States, the world’s largest consumer market — regardless of the trade war.
Shanghai-based Bc Babycare expects its supply chain diversification and the U.S. market potential to more than offset the impact of ongoing U.S.-China trade tensions, according to Chi Yang, the company’s vice president of Europe and the Americas.

“Even [if] the political things are not steady … I’m very confident about our product for the moment,” he told CNBC, adding he anticipates “very fast” growth in the U.S. in coming years. That includes his bold predictions that Bc Babycare’s flagship baby carrier can become the best-seller on Amazon.com in half a year, and that U.S. sales can grow by 10-fold in a year.
The $159.99 carrier, eligible for a $40 discount, already has 4.7 stars on Amazon.com across more than 30 reviews. The device claims to reduce pressure on the parent’s body by up to 33%. A far cheaper version of the baby carrier is a top seller among travel products for pregnancy and childbirth on JD.com in China.
Bc Babycare already has the carrier stocked in its U.S. warehouses, and has a network of factories and raw materials suppliers in the Americas, Europe and Asia, Yang said. “The global supply chain is one of the things we keep on building in the past couple years.”

The Trump administration has sought to reduce U.S. reliance on China-made goods and to encourage the return of manufacturing jobs to the U.S. In a rapid escalation of tensions last month, the U.S. and China had added tariffs of more than 100% on each other’s goods. Last week, the two sides agreed to a 90-day pause for most of the new duties in order to discuss a trade deal.
Baby gear is particularly sensitive to tariffs since the majority of those sold in the U.S. are made in China, said U.S.-based Newell Brands, which owns stroller company Graco, on an April 30 earnings call. That’s according to a FactSet transcript.

The company said it raised baby gear prices by about 20% in the last few weeks, but had not incorporated the additional 125% tariffs announced in mid-April. Newell said on the call it had about three to four months of inventory in the U.S., and had paused additional orders from China.
The company did not respond to a request for comment about whether it had resumed orders from China and whether it planned more price increases.

U.S. office plans

Bc Babycare declined to share how much it planned to invest in the U.S. But Yang said the company plans to open an office in the country and hire about five to 10 locals.
The company initially plans to sell online, spend on marketing and eventually work with major retailers for offline store sales. Its partners for raw materials and research include three U.S. companies: Lyra, Dow and Eastman.
The Chinese company, which entered the baby products segment in 2014, in 2021 claimed a 700 million yuan ($97.09 million) funding round from investors including Sequoia Capital China.
Yang said the company scrutinizes the comments section on Chinese and U.S. e-commerce websites to improve its products. As a result, the U.S. version of the baby carrier is softer and larger than the Chinese version, he said.

Weekly analysis and insights from Asia’s largest economy in your inboxSubscribe now

Bc Babycare’s U.S. market ambitions reflect how large U.S. and European multinationals not only face growing competition in China, but also in their home markets.
“After experiencing substantial growth due to the premiumization of consumption in the Chinese market, multinational brands are now entering a challenging second phase where they compete fiercely for market share,” Dave Xie, retail and consumer goods partner in Shanghai at consultancy Oliver Wyman, said in a statement last week.
Oliver Wyman said in a report last month that the Chinese market has become the incubator for premium product innovations that are being exported. The authors noted, for example, that Tineco floor scrubbers have become Amazon best-sellers. More

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned Monday about the risks of record U.S. deficits, tariffs and international tensions.
Dimon, the chairman of the biggest U.S. bank by assets, said stock markets aren’t properly representing the possibility of higher inflation and even stagflation.
Dimon also discussed his timeline to hand over the CEO reins to one of his deputies.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, leaves the U.S. Capitol after a meeting with Republican members of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on the issue of de-banking on Feb. 13, 2025.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Monday that markets and central bankers underappreciate the risks created by record U.S. deficits, tariffs and international tensions.
Dimon, the veteran CEO and chairman of the biggest U.S. bank by assets, explained his worldview during his bank’s annual investor day meeting in New York. He said he believes the risks of higher inflation and even stagflation aren’t properly represented by stock market values, which have staged a comeback from lows in April.

“We have huge deficits; we have what I consider almost complacent central banks,” Dimon said. “You all think they can manage all this. I don’t think they can,” he said.
“My own view is people feel pretty good because you haven’t seen effective tariffs,” Dimon said. “The market came down 10%, [it’s] back up 10%. That’s an extraordinary amount of complacency.”
Dimon’s comments follow Moody’s rating agency downgrading the U.S. credit rating on Friday over concerns about the government’s growing debt burden. Markets have been whipsawed over the past few months over worries that President Donald Trump’s trade policies will raise inflation and slow the world’s largest economy.
Dimon said Monday that he believed Wall Street earnings estimates for S&P 500 companies, which have already declined in the first weeks of Trump’s trade policies, will fall further as companies pull or lower guidance amid the uncertainty.
In six months, those projections will fall to 0% earnings growth after starting the year at around 12%, Dimon said. If that were to happen, stocks prices will likely fall.

“I think earnings estimates will come down, which means PE will come down,” Dimon said, referring to the price to earnings ratio tracked closely by stock market analysts.
The odds of stagflation, “which is basically a recession with inflation,” are roughly double what the market thinks, Dimon added.
Separately, one of Dimon’s top deputies said corporate clients are still in “wait-and-see” mode when it comes to acquisitions and other deals.
Investment banking revenue is headed for a “mid-teens” percentage decline in the second quarter compared with the year-earlier period, while trading revenue was trending higher by a “mid-to-high” single-digit percentage, said Troy Rohrbaugh, a co-head of the firm’s commercial and investment bank.
On the ever-present question of Dimon’s timeline to hand over the CEO reins to one of his deputies, Dimon said nothing has changed from his guidance last year, when he said he would likely remain for less than five more years.
“If I’m here for four more years, and maybe two more” as executive chairman, Dimon said, “that’s a long time.”
Of all the executive presentations given Monday, consumer banking chief Marianne Lake had the longest speaking time at a full hour. She is considered a top successor candidate, especially after Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Piepszak said she would not be seeking the top job.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO More