Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has jumped to third place in the smartphone brand consideration chart for the country, behind Apple’s iPhone and Samsung, but ahead of local and international rivals including Nokia, HTC, Huawei, Lenovo and ZTE, according to a survey by TrendForce and Avanti Research Partners.

Some 12.2 percent of respondents said they would consider purchasing a device from the vendor, compared with 17.8 percent for Samsung.

Impressively, the Chinese company has moved to third after having been in fifth in the first quarter of 2012, leapfrogging HTC and Nokia in the interim.

According to the survey, Xiaomi has benefitted from its social media activities and its “understanding of customer expectations”. The Miui operating system it uses – a variant of Android – was also praised for its “suitability…to Chinese users”.

The vendor is said to offer products which “demonstrate a high price-performance ratio”.

While Xiamoi is clearly benefitting in terms of brand recognition, the company is lagging in terms of sales – TrendForce places it tenth in China based on shipment volumes. This was attributed to its “limited capacity and sales channels” – which may account for the discrepancy between desire to buy, and actual sales.

An AllThingsD report in October 2012 said that the launch run of 50,000 Xiaomi Phone 2 devices sold out in less than three minutes of availability. An additional 250,000 were scheduled to have been released last month.