Xiaomi to focus on future growth in India

CHANDIGARH: Chinese smartphone major Xiaomi has said India is the biggest market for the company outside China and the aim is to sustain its growth in the country.

Also, the company has invested on building infrastructure for manufacturing and distribution and service centres, it said.

"India is the biggest market for us outside of China and the focus is to keep growing in India. We have invested a lot of resources to build the entire India business, it is not just about coming and selling phones," Raghu Reddy, head of Online Sales, Xiaomi India, told reporters here.

Reddy was here in connection with Xiaomi launching Redmi 5A in Chandigarh, starting at a price of Rs 4,999.

"We have set up infrastructure from a manufacturing stand point as well as from distribution and service stand point. At present, we have more than 650 plus service centres across 350 cities in the country," he said.

To a question, he said Chandigarh is one of the biggest centres for us in north India, outside of Delhi.

Xiaomi had announced its third manufacturing plant in India in addition to the two existing units at Sri City in Andhra Pradesh. The third manufacturing unit is a dedicated Power Bank facility in partnership with Hipad Technology in Noida, Uttar Pradesh and the production capacity for the facility is nearly 7 power banks per minute during its operational hours, he said.

He said in 2017, Xiaomi made tremendous progress in terms of making their phones available offline.

"In 2017, there were two pillars to our offline strategy -- one is what we called Mi Homes, which exclusively sell Xiaomi products. Now, we have 15 Mi Homes across the country, which are exclusive retail outlets. We are trying to introduce many of these across India including Chandigarh," he said.

Reddy said the "second pillar" of their offline strategy is "what we call as Mi preferred partners".

"We are tying up with multi-brand retail outlets and selling the phones through them as well. At present, we have more than 1,500 Mi preferred partners across 15 plus cities.

The third pillar of strategy is working with large format retail partners like Chroma and Reliance Digital, he added.

Reddy informed that in Q3 of this year (July, August, September), Xiaomi had shipped out more than 92 lakh phones.

"More than 95% of our phones are getting manufactured at Sri city plants. We started Make in India journey in 2015, we have two plants in Sri city in Andhra Pradesh," he said.

"As of Q3 of 2017, Xiaomi is the number one smartphone company in India. When we started in 2017, our online business accounted for 95% of our sales, offline was less than five percent. And now as we end the year, offline is about 20% of our share and 80% is online share," he said.


About the price range of the handsets, he said, "Our range starts from Rs 4,999 and goes up to Rs 36,000. We have about seven models in this price range."


"The way we look at the market, we don"t want to launch 50 different models or 100 different models, but the idea is to focus on just a few models, make them right and make them perfect in terms of right product at right price," he said.


He said Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, launched in January this year, "is the highest selling smartphone in India".

"Redmi 4 is the number two smartphone selling in this country," he added.