In part 1 of our year-end episode, we discuss five major events in Asia that occurred in 2015: (a) the surge of venture capital financing in Asia and its implications, (b) SoftBank’s Pepper with Alibaba and Foxconn, (c) the Nintendo-DeNA deal, (d) Xiaomi’s challenging year and (e) global recognition of Wechat’s messaging platform. We also added a short discussion on the upcoming dawn of self-driving cars and examine its implications for on-demand taxi-hailing apps, investors and car makers.

Valuations are very useful tool to gain insight into a company's future (or at least what investors think that future might look like). As we begin 2015, let's look back at the some of the highest valuations in consumer tech services and attempt to understand their drivers.

Benedict Evans recently wrote an insightful piece exploring new questions for the mobile industry. Among the 5 questions he brought up, I believe that the evolution of interaction models and messaging will end up being the most important. I don't have anything to add there as think Benedict's analysis here was excellent. However, I do think that three of his questions could benefit from deeper analysis. I also think that he may have missed a crucial question brought on by the scale of the mobile industry.

Last year, I wrote a post verifying Xiaomi's claim that their users are twice as active as those of other manufacturers, which also validated their long-term pursuit of a services-oriented business model. But as they moved to lower price points, we assumed that their engagement levels would gradually decline. However, based on some recent metrics revealed by the company, that may not be the case.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported some of Xiaomi's financial metrics from 2012 and 2013. The two most interesting data points were the proportion of Xiaomi's revenue from services (~1%) and their sales and marketing costs.

The smartphone market saw an interesting dichotomy this week that reflects a changing basis of competition. Samsung announced a revenue and profit decline, while Xiaomi's Q3 sales grew 20% sequentially (and 300% annually). For Xiaomi, this continues a pattern that I highlighted earlier this year.

Canalys just reported that Xiaomi became China's largest smartphone maker by shipping 14.99 million units in Q2 2014. This data point is interesting for two reasons -- the first deals with their success in China, and the second deals with the state of their international expansion.

The most important takeaway from Xiaomi's Mi-4 launch was the amount of media attention it received. In response, some have begun to question the validity of Xiaomi's proposed business model. Interestingly, Xiaomi has been fairly transparent revenue from services. We can use this to benchmark Xiaomi's monetization performance with other leading in services players.

Flurry just posted some interesting data comparing Xiaomi's users to those of the iPhone and other Android smartphones. We already know that Xiaomi's users download roughly twice as many apps as iPhone and Android users, but now we also have comparative data on engagement and user demographics. This data paints a picture that is very different from the popular narrative surrounding Xiaomi, i.e. it only caters to low-end, price sensitive customers.

Yesterday, Xiaomi announced that it sold 26.1 million smartphones in H1 2014, totaling $5.3 billion in revenue. Xiaomi's goal is to sell 60 million smartphones and generate $11.2 billion in revenue by the end of the year, but these figures seem too conservative when compared to their current performance.

In 2010, the smartphone market was still in its early days and numerous OEMs seemed to be fighting on equal footing (at least based on the figures). But in 2011, Apple and Samsung broke free from the crowd and have dominated OEM shipments ever since. One of the interesting patterns to note is the lack of cyclicality in their early sales/shipment performance compared to the rest of the market.

Xiaomi's CEO, Lei Jun, revealed some interesting figures last week that could shed some more light on the potential of their business model. While most of these figures refer to sales volume, we can also use them to gauge the potential of future services revenues -- Xiaomi's core monetization strategy.

It's time again for my quarterly recap of smartphone market share figures from Gartner and Kantar. For those who missed it, here's the Q3 recap. In Q4, Android continued to dominate the charts, while the iPhone saw a lower than expected seasonal bump. And as I expected, Windows Phone's recent growth seems to have stalled.

Xiaomi recently announced some 2013 statistics related to its hardware and services businesses which showed continued strong growth. Interestingly, the company is also said to be planning to launch smartphones priced at $50.

Data on the Chinese smartphone market is extremely hard to come by. So when Baidu releases a report with install base and sales figures on Chinese Android smartphones, Google translate becomes every analyst's best friend.

Yesterday, Motorola announced the Moto G, a high-quality smartphone priced at just $179-$199. This announcement marks the first true shift in Motorola's traditional hardware-based strategy since the Google acquisition. This move invalidates suggestions about Google targeting hardware profits.

Trendforce's survey of Chinese smartphone owners showed that Xiaomi overtook HTC to become the country's fifth most used smartphone brand. Given their recent traction, this isn't much of a surprise. However, the popularity of Xiaomi's $130 "Red Rice" smartphone among existing smartphone owners is paints an interesting picture.

TheNextWeb just published a very interesting interview of Xiaomi's co-founder and president, Bin Lin. His comments are consistent with my thoughts about Xiaomi's business model and inherent strengths. Let's take a look at a few of his quotes and what they tell us about the future of this company.