Xiaomi on Friday celebrated the opening of its 500th service center in India, promising that it’s now offering the “best in class” service in the South Asian country and substantiating that claim with a recent IMRB-made report which said that 93 percent of the company’s customers are satisfied with the after sales services provided by the Chinese original equipment manufacturer (OEM). Even though Xiaomi is still somewhat away from catching up to Samsung in terms of market share in India, with the South Korean OEM currently accounting for more than one-fifth of all phone sales in the country according to virtually every credible research, the Beijing, China-based tech giant seemingly dominates the after sales segment that’s highly valued by many consumers.
The firm is now boasting about its two local call centers employing more than 600 experts, three device repair factories, and two warehouses supplying the rest of its after sales network with spare parts. The wording of the company’s latest announcement implies that its infrastructure might expand in the future, depending on Xiaomi’s general performance, i.e. the number of people purchasing its devices. The Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer recorded a decline in performance in recent years, especially in its home country where it lost market share to a number of BBK Electronics-owned phone makers like OPPO, Vivo, and OnePlus. The company’s top management also previously admitted that the tech giant grew too fast and is now interested in becoming a more sustainable business at the expense of aggressive expansion efforts.
This newly adopted business strategy entails several major moves, including a significant diversification of Xiaomi’s portfolio that was previously largely focused on smartphones, as well as possible price increases across the majority of its product categories. Given how Xiaomi’s devices already offer relatively high value for money, the company may be looking to redirect some results of its rising profit margins into after sales services, a segment that only a few OEMs in the world pay a lot of attention to. The reason why Xiaomi opted to put its focus on India also seems to be relatively straightforward, with the South Asian country being the second-largest phone market in the world that’s showing almost no signs of saturation and is hence an attractive proposition to virtually every OEM on the planet.