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four-year-old Chinese tech company has become world's third-largest smartphone maker, behind Samsung and Apple. company is called Xiaomi Inc. It has also become world's most valuable tech start-up and is more valuable than Uber, Dropbox, Pinterest and Snapchat. Beijing-based company just raised $1.1 billion in funding and is now worth $45 billion. That makes it worth more than tech giants LG, Motorola and Sony put together. Xiaomi is also world's fastest-growing smartphone maker. Its sales increased by 211 per cent in 2014. Its market share has also increased from 2 per cent to 5 per cent over past year and it looks like that will increase further.

Xiaomi has unique business model. It sells its phones for around what they cost to make. Profits come from apps and software. It also makes its customers follow company. Many Xiaomi users in China are very loyal fans of company. company uses marketing campaigns that give fans chance to win prizes. This makes company very popular. Bin Lin, Xiaomi co-founder and president, said: "We will strive to continue bringing innovation to everyone, with goal of producing high-quality, high-performance devices with great user experience." However, not everyone is fan of Xiaomi. Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive said Xiaomi stole design of its phone and many ideas from Apple.