XIAOMI Corp., the world’s fourth-largest smartphone maker, is entering Japan and taking on Apple Inc. with a budget-friendly smartphone and a connected fitness tracker.

The firm is making the Mi Note 10 Android smartphone available in Japan for immediate pre-order to be shipped Dec. 16.

Priced from 52,800 yen (US$486), the handset has a high-resolution 108-megapixel camera, a 5,260mAh battery rated to last longer than two days and a 6.5-inch OLED display with curved edges.

Alongside the Mi Note, Xiaomi also introduced its Mi Smart Band 4 wearable for 3,490 yen, a portable battery pack for 1,899 yen, an induction-heating rice cooker for 9,999 yen and a premium all-metal suitcase for 17,900 yen, all aggressively priced for the Japanese market.

The top Chinese smartphone vendor after Huawei Technologies Co. is looking eastward to help offset declining share in its home market.

Xiaomi’s China shipments took a 30 percent dive last quarter, while hardware sales in India and Europe grew.

It faces an uphill battle in Japan, however, where the smartphone market has been shrinking, is dominated by Apple and features unique consumer preferences that have kept domestic brands like Sharp Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. relevant.

“Xiaomi has to keep looking for new markets to recover its smartphone shipment growth, after losing its market share in China,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anthea Lai said.

“Outside the homegrown brands, Japanese have a strong preference for the iPhone.”

Apple shipped about 45 percent of all the smartphones in Japan in the fiscal first half to Sept. 30, according to a report by MM Research Institute Ltd.

Sharp, Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony Corp. followed, none of which exceeded 13 percent. Huawei, which ranked fifth last fiscal year, didn’t make the top 5 after carriers earlier this year dropped its models from their lineups amid China-U.S. trade tensions.(SD-Agencies)