Bengaluru, Jan 17 (IANS): Chinese handset maker Xiaomi on Friday announced it was spinning off its aspirational premium sub-brand POCO as a standalone brand, which will now operate independently with its own team and go-to market strategy in the country.

Started as a sub-brand of Xiaomi in 2018, POCO began operations in the country with a small team and launched its POCO F1 smartphone.

"What started as a sub-brand in POCO has grown into its own identity in a short span of time. POCO F1 is an extremely popular phone across user groups, and remains a top contender in its category even in 2020. We feel the time is right to let POCO operate on its own now. We will spin it off as an independent brand," Manu Jain, Xiaomi Vice President and Xiaomi India Managing Director, said in a statement.

This comes a day after the smartphone player announced it was going big on its premium "Mi" line up in India this year and the portfolio will see a sustained set of launches through 2020.

"These launches will be across categories which we think will help 'Mi' maintain consumer interest in 2020. We also intend to bring the premium smartphones from the Mi line-up, which has recorded a substantial interest since we entered the market," Raghu Reddy, Head of Categories, Xiaomi India, had told IANS.

Notably, the premium "Mi" and budget "Redmi" are still sub brands of the handset maker in India.

The company earlier said it believed in maintaining a proper balance for both offline and online.

"Both platforms online and offline are equally important for us and currently our online to offline ratio is 60:40. However, we aim to bring the same to 50:50 very soon in 2020," Reddy said.