Chandigarh : Chinese smartphone major Xiaomi on Friday 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 in the western city. Reddy was here in connection with Xiaomi launching Redmi 5A in Chandigarh, starting at a price f 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 third-quarter of this year (July, August, September), Xiaomi had shipped out more than 92 lakh phones.
