Xiaomi has, since its inception, been an online only company. They’ve been selling their devices online, through flash sales, for a long time, and even though they did set up a few offline stores to show off their newest tech in China, they never actually opened up a chain of retail stores. That is going to change soon though. The company’s CEO had announced yesterday that Xiaomi plans to open up over 1,000 retail stores in the next couple of years, which managed to surprise quite a few people, even though it makes sense considering Xiaomi’s competitors managed to profit quite a bit from such approach.
Having that in mind, let’s talk about Xiaomi India for a bit. The company is selling their devices in India with the help from various partners, and they’re looking to expand their offline sales chain in the country. Xiaomi has announced that they’re partnering with Just Buy Live and Innocomm in order to expand their offline distribution in India. Xiaomi’s devices will, thanks to this partnership, be available through retailers such as Sengeetha, Big C, LOT Mobiles, etc. Xiaomi believes that these new partnerships will help them to hit over 5,000 offline stores all over the country. The company’s Redmi 2, Redmi 2 Prime, Redmi Note Prime, Redmi Note 3, Mi Max and Mi 5 will be available in a number of larger cities in India thanks to this offline expansion. The best thing of all, the prices will be comparable to the online prices, so you basically won’t have any perks buying online, other than the fact you don’t have to physically go over to the store, but many people actually want to try out a device before they purchase it, which is probably why such model has been so successful for OPPO and Vivo.
Xiaomi is currently working on expanding their production capacity in India as well, they intend to manufacture even more devices in India as part of the ‘Make in India’ initiative, mainly so that they don’t have to import devices from China in order to sell them in India. They currently manufacture the vast majority of their products in the country, but a smaller portion is still being imported from China.