“I don’t think what we did is justified,” said Anuj Sharma, chief marketing officer at Xiaomi India, as he unwrapped a candy and put it in his mouth. “I feel like we used a gun in a knife fight,” Sharma said with a big smile, referring to the new Xiaomi 14 Civi, which the company introduced in the Indian market on Wednesday. The Xiaomi 14 Civi is the company’s first Civi-series smartphone in India, and is priced starting at Rs 42,999. It is also the most affordable Xiaomi smartphone with Leica-branded cameras in India.

We have been using the Xiaomi 14 Civi for about a week, and with its 3,000nit display, Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, triple camera setup with Leica tuning, and premium design, we find it interesting that the company managed to keep the price of the device under Rs 50,000. The base variant of the phone, with all bank offers and exchange offers, can be bought for Rs 39,999. But why is this price interesting? The point is this. There are a lot of smartphone options in the under Rs 40,000 segment. Again, there are a lot of options in the more premium segment. But the Rs 40,000 to Rs 50,000 segment has been a blank in the smartphone market. In 2024, only one phone was launched in this segment and that is the OnePlus 12R. Enter the Xiaomi 14 Civi.

But it’s not like the smartphone maker was just avoiding this particular price segment. From what Xiaomi India CMO told us, it seems like making a smartphone in this category is no easy task.

“It is difficult to offer all these premium features at this price,” says Anuj Sharma. “When you try to add premium features to a device, the prices and component costs suddenly increase. Even with the Xiaomi 14 Civi, if we were any other brand, we would have launched this smartphone between Rs 55,000 and Rs 60,000. But we have to follow Xiaomi’s ways, so we can’t do that. We also don’t want to do that because we want to open up a new market segment at a price that becomes irresistible.”

At this point in the conversation, Sharma picks up the Xiaomi 14 Civi and says, “It’s also very important to get that balance, which I think has been missing for a while”.

“The Xiaomi 14 Civi starts from where the Note ends. The Redmi Note 13 Pro+ is priced at around Rs 31,000. Now the Xiaomi 14 Civi takes everything to the next level from here, including the design, performance, storage, RAM, and if we talk about cameras, it’s a huge leap. The camera on the Xiaomi 14 Civi is closer to the Xiaomi 14 than the Redmi Note,” says Sharma.

But why Civi? For those who don’t know, the Civi series was launched in China in 2021 and was very design-centric. Coming to India, Xiaomi is trying to change that. Here, the focus is on design, but there is also a lot of attention on the phone’s display, camera, and battery performance. This is what Sharma told us, and as we test the 14 Civi, it becomes even more evident.

Sharma explains, “This year the Civi team in China changed its strategy and made a more balanced device by focusing on performance, camera and battery apart from design and then we felt that this is a great device for the Indian market and it fits well in the Xiaomi 14 series. And since it was made by the Civi team, we call it by the same name.”

While we are waiting to test the Xiaomi 14 Civi (you can read our quick review of the phone here) a bit more, we are also wondering what’s next for Xiaomi smartphones. We asked Anuj Sharma about this. He says, “We are just starting work on the camera part of the smartphone. Now, the advantage of the new hardware and camera is also going to be that when the AI ​​features start coming in, we will be ready for it. This can change the way you use your smartphone.”

Sharma also revealed that the company is working on new AI features that will enable Xiaomi’s Human x Car x Home vision, but these are expected to be rolled out “sometime in the future”. He says that the AI ​​features will also reveal the true purpose of HyperOS.

Our final question to Sharma was another hint to tell us about Xiaomi’s future plans. The Xiaomi India CMO reluctantly revealed the company’s plans to refresh its lineup that “hasn’t been updated in a while”. Sharma didn’t reveal any further details and quickly went silent on the topic. But we’re wondering, an air purifier?