Xiaomi is quickly becoming a buzzword in the smartphone world. It seems as though they are impressing just about everyone at the moment. That is not too surprising, as they have managed to bring to market some seriously good hardware as seriously good prices. This is how they have quickly established themselves in the top three smartphone manufacturers in the world. And that is still while they have not entered all the markets that the other manufacturers are already in.
One of the ways in which Xiaomi have managed to offer devices at such competitive price-points is by cutting out what most other manufacturers think of as traditional means of business, physical stores. In fact, Xiaomi do all of their business online. This is one point that recently hit the news as there are a number of shops which have popped up in China, claiming to be Xiaomi stores. As a result, Xiaomi CEO announced users should not buy from any of these shops as they are ‘fake shops‘. Xiaomi, does online business and that is where they have seemed to have hurt a number of other manufacturers and especially in China.
It seems this notion is not lost on the other manufacturers either. HTC today announced that they will be soon opening a 24-hour e-commerce store in Taiwan. This is straight out of the Xiaomi playbook and will be interesting to see how it pans out. In terms of the details, the store will open its (e)doors on February 4th at approximately 10pm. The (e)shop will be a little bare at first, as there will only be two devices available and these will be the HTC Desire 816G and the Desire 626G. To add to their e-commerce vision, HTC North Asia President, Andy Tong also announced that by December 2015, they hope to be selling a number of lower priced handsets via ‘e-commerce platforms’. The company were quick though to make it clear that they will not be burning their bridges with retail outlets and carriers by suggesting they expect e-commerce sales to only account for (less than) 10% of their Taiwan sales. What do you think? Should HTC be taking on Xiaomi at their own game? Will a 24-hour e-commerce store help HTC in their home market? Let us know your thoughts.