Chinese smartphone major Xiaomi 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”, said Raghu Reddy, Head of Online Sales, Xiaomi India to ET.
“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.
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.
“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 per cent of our sales, offline was less than five per cent. And now as we end the year, offline is about 20 per cent of our share and 80 per cent is online share,” he said.
“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.
