Xiaomi Stares Down a Crucial Week as Stock Nears Lows and Big Bets Come Due

Xiaomi's shares sink nearly 25% year-to-date despite heavy buybacks. First-quarter earnings due May 26 and 17T smartphone launch May 28 are key catalysts amid margin pressure and AI investments.

Xiaomi has been spending heavily on its own shares — roughly 100 million Hong Kong dollars in a recent buyback round — but the stock keeps sliding. At €3.38, the equity has surrendered nearly 25% since the start of the year and sits just 6% above its 52-week trough of €3.17. The disconnect between the company's ambitions and its market valuation has become acute, and the next 72 hours will test whether a trio of near-term catalysts can close the gap.

Earnings Due Tuesday, Phone Launch Thursday

The board of directors convenes on May 26 to approve the unaudited first-quarter results for fiscal 2026. Analysts are bracing for a sharp contraction. Citigroup, for one, forecasts revenue of 98.4 billion yuan, down from the prior period, while adjusted net profit may tumble 45% to 5.9 billion yuan. The culprit, according to the bank, is weaker smartphone revenue combined with the expiration of government purchase subsidies for electric vehicles — a segment that had shown meaningful profit improvement last year.

Investors will be listening closely to CEO Lei Jun's commentary on margins. He has already warned that rising prices for memory chips and electronic components are squeezing the entire handset industry. That makes the quality of the upcoming margin numbers far more important than top-line sales.

Two days after the earnings release, Xiaomi will launch its 17T smartphone series globally on May 28 — the earliest debut for this product line in company history. The move is aggressive: the base model starts at €749 in Europe, the Pro version at €999. The latter packs a 7,000 mAh battery and MediaTek's Dimensity 9500 chip, and for the first time in this price bracket, Leica optics are included. The accelerated launch signals Xiaomi's push to capture higher-margin premium market share.

AI, Autos, and a Massive Buyback Campaign

Beyond the immediate week, Xiaomi is laying down long-term bets that dwarf the near-term headwinds. The company has committed at least 60 billion yuan to artificial intelligence over the next three years as part of a five-year, 200-billion-yuan investment program targeting core technologies — semiconductors, AI, and proprietary operating systems. The strategy is already producing results: the MiMo-V2.5-Pro AI model, unveiled at the end of April, took first place for autonomous task completion in an open-source benchmark from Artificial Analysis, while ranking second and third in general intelligence and coding tests behind DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with roughly one trillion parameters and a one-million-token context window.

The automotive division remains the biggest wild card. The electric SUV YU7 GT is expected to hit the Chinese market by the end of May, and a European launch is slated for the second half of 2027, supported by a newly established research and design center in Munich headed by former BMW M technical chief Rudolf Dittrich.

To back up its confidence, Xiaomi has been buying stock at an accelerated pace. Through the end of April, it had already repurchased 7.4 billion Hong Kong dollars' worth of shares — exceeding the full-year total of 6.3 billion in 2025. The recent 100 million HKD round is just the latest installment. Yet the buybacks have failed to arrest the slide; the stock is now about 44% below its level a year ago and roughly 25% under its 200-day moving average.

The Week Ahead

The earnings print on Tuesday could either validate the buyback strategy or expose it as a stopgap. If Xiaomi demonstrates that the auto business is not crushing margins, the current price may lure more buyers. But a miss, especially on gross margins, would put the 52-week low at €3.17 back in play. With the 17T launch and the YU7 GT debut just days apart, this is the most concentrated run of news the stock has faced all year.