Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which entered India in 2014, has decided to gain a stronger foothold in the country via offline sales. The manufacturer owns 5000 stores now and it plans to shoot up the numbers to 10,000 by the beginning of 2017, according to Manu Jain, India Head of Xiaomi.
"For us, online is the dominant channel and we are trying to build a base for offline in India. We had a partnership with Redington last year (for distribution) and four weeks back, tied up with Innocomm and Just Buy Live," he said.
Xiaomi makes 90% of its sales from online.“Our existing stores are in Tier I and Tier II cities, we would now enter Tier III cities, too, while increasing presence in the two former categories,” Manu Jain added.
The company has also increased its number of employees in the country, from 35 people to 100-members. It is focusing more on manufacturing in India. More than 75% of Xiaomi smartphones sold in India are made in the country. Around 1 million phones are sold by the company in the quarter. It recently launched two smartphones -- Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime priced at Rs. 6999 and Rs. 8999 respectively. The phones will be initially sold via Mi.com and Flipkart.
Yesterday, Xiaomi made its first sale of Redmi 3S and the company claimed to have recorded sales of 90,000 units. The newly launched smartphones are manufactured in the company’s Andhra Pradesh facility."We are scaling up the facility at Andhra Pradesh. We are adding more lines and more capacity to the same plant and once we exhaust it, we are thinking of adding more factories along with our partners Foxconn," Jain said.
Xiaomi also has plans to expand the product portfolio in the country. In an interaction to PTI earlier, Manu Jain mentioned the company’s plan to launch air purifiers in the country. However, no specific launch date or pricing of the product was mentioned.
