"There are a lot of companies that would love to be selling 1m devices," said Ramon Llamas of tech market analysis firm IDC.
Research firms IDC and Strategy analytics both now place Xiaomi in overall third place for smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2014, more than tripling shipments year-on-year overtaking South Korea's LG by between 0.4m and 1.2m smartphones.
"It's definitely disrupting everyone," said Ryan Lai, a researcher at IDC. "Now consumers expect phones with high-end specs at low prices".
IDC is predicting 45.7m wearable tech devices will be sold in 2015.
Xiaomi shipped 17.3m smartphones in the third quarter, 5.3% of the 327.6m total global shipments, according to data from IDC.
"The smartphone market in India is expected to more than double between now and 2018 and much of this is expected to be driven by the migration from feature phones to smartphones," explained Kiran Kumar research manager of IDC India.
For "smart wearables" – gadgets like the Apple Watch that can run applications without another processor – IDC expects sales to more than quintuple this year.
IDC will revisit its predictions this coming quarter.
In the same period, Samsung shipped 78.1m smartphones and Apple 39.3m, while Lenovo shipped 16.9m and LG 16.8m, which IDC describes as a tie due to the variability in the data.
IDC, a market research firm based in Framingham, Massachusetts, expects over 13% of the processors in PCs to be based on ARM designs by 2015.
According to IDC, a market researcher, Android was the system of choice for three-quarters of the 181m smartphones shipped in the third quarter of 2012.
