Xiaomi surpassed $370 million in Tmal revenue on Chinese Singles’ Day 2017, the Beijing-based original equipment manufacturer announced earlier this week. The latest iteration of the shopping holiday took place on Saturday, having proven to be a lucrative endeavor for numerous consumer electronics companies in the Far Eastern country. While Xiaomi wasn’t the most successful vendor in China on November 11th in terms of revenue, it did achieve the highest results out of all smartphone makers in the country, having recorded the largest number of sold handsets in China over the last Singles’ Day for the fifth consecutive year.
Less than four minutes after the Singles’ Day 2017 sale started on Saturday at midnight local time, the company already generated 100 million yuan in revenue, which amounts to approximately $15.06 million. The strong performance continued throughout the day, with Xiaomi posting nearly hourly updates on its official forums. The Chinese Singles’ Day was originally established as a shopping holiday in 2009 by Alibaba, with Xiaomi being quick to embrace it due to its digital-focused business model. The holiday itself was introduced in an effort to increase sales during a traditionally dormant period in China, encouraging young single Chinese people to celebrate their relationship status by buying themselves a gift. The nationwide festival is now the most lucrative offline and online shopping day in the world, according to some estimates, with its date originally being picked because the figure “1” is meant to be illustrative of a single individual.
While Xiaomi‘s online retail efforts have once propelled the company to the title of the world’s most valuable startup, Uber surpassed its valuation in recent years, with the Chinese firm’s business endeavors also evolving in the meantime; these days, Xiaomi is committing significant resources to offline distribution and has been opening its own brick-and-mortar stores around the world, in addition to collaborating with third-party resellers and subsidizing some of their expenses in order to have its products more prominently featured in their stores. This particular strategy has been aggressively pursued by Xiaomi in India, a market that the firm is now close to leading despite only entering it three years ago.