Analysts reckon that it now wants to raise up to $10bn in an initial public offering (IPO) on Hong Kong’s stock exchange which was announced on May 3rd. (Its filing documents disclose neither the valuation that it is seeking, nor a fundraising target.) That could afford it a very generous valuation of as much as $80bn—not far off the $91bn market capitalisation of Baidu, China’s biggest search engine and one of the country’s three “BAT” tech titans alongside Alibaba and Tencent.

A resurgent Xiaomi wagers that its Mi-Fans, to whom it has regularly turned online for ideas and feedback, are loyal, and that “amazing products” at “honest prices” will encourage more people to snap up its phones. It says that already 1.4m users own more than five of its hardware products. By 2022 it expects to generate $10bn in annual revenues from 1,000 physical Mi stores that sell its phones, laptops and some of its 300-odd lifestyle gadgets (mainly built by startups in which Xiaomi has stakes).

Many thought it had overstretched, launching internet-connected gadgets, from rice cookers to drones, to create an ecosystem of devices that could be controlled from smartphones. Sales of these gizmos and Xiaomi’s low-cost but high-specification handsets accounted for 91% of its $18bn in revenues last year, yet they made only wafer-thin gross profits of 8.8%, a small fraction of the 39% that Apple makes on its iPhones.

Last month Mr Lei announced, to the horror of some potential investors, that he would aim to keep overall net profit margins for all of this hardware under 5%. For a long time his approach has been to make money on internet services by luring users into the Xiaomi universe with unbeatable handset prices. A banker who has helped prepare its listing sees big moneymaking potential in India, where Xiaomi overtook Samsung at the end of last year as the country’s top-selling smartphone-maker,