New Delhi Aug 17 (IANS) Aiming to gain a further foothold in the offline smartphone market as the festive season inches near Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi on Thursday unveiled an exclusive Mi Home retail store at Ambience Mall Gurugram.
"The store would be thrown open for the public on August 19 at 10 am " Manu Jain Vice President Xiaomi and Managing Director Xiaomi India told IANS here.
Xiaomi has primarily been an online-exclusive brand but it aggressively stepped up its offline presence across India this year via its Mi Home stores Mi Preferred Partner (PP) stores and Large Format Retailer (LFR) partners.
"Till last year the offline numbers used to be less than 10 per cent. It fell down to about 5 per cent in the beginning of this year with the release of Redmi Note 4 because it was an online-exclusive model. We then started re-builing our offline journey and for the first time in July 2017 we crossed 20 per cent " Jain informed.
According to market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) Xiaomi now has a 17.9 per cent market share in the Indian smartphone space.
The company s Redmi Note 4 has pipped Samsung s Galaxy J2 as the top shipped smartphone in India in the second quarter with 7.97 per cent market share.
The company is now focusing on expanding Mi Home stores and plans to add 100 such stores in the next two years.
Xiaomi now has about 100 Mi Preferred Partners or city distributors in 11 cities including Kolkata Kochi Chennai and Guwahati among others.
"We have 600 Mi Preferred Partners right now and want to take it 20 cities by October. We want to take it to 1 500 stores across 30 cities by the end of this year " Jain told IANS.
The company s first Mi Preferred Partner store came up in Bengaluru where Xiaomi also opened its first Mi Home in May this year.
Xiaomi ruled out the flash sales strategy for Mi Homes . "We would not see shortage of phones in these stores and if a device is out of stock the buyer can ask for an F-code to purchase the device online " Jain noted.
Xiaomi has also begun carrying out pilot programmes in rural areas that have limited reach and less exposure to e-commerce sites.
Currently the programme is being tested in Karnataka where the company is working with retailers in a different way.
Xiaomi ships its products to over 14 000 pin codes -- close to 40 percent of the country s total -- every single week.
"We are now present in more than 8 500 stores via our innovative offline distribution network. Last year was indeed a great year and we achieved several milestones while building our India story " Jain had earlier told IANS.
Xiaomi India reached three major milestones in 2016 -- it crossed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time secured a spot among the top three smartphone players in the country and in October sold a record 1.35 million smartphones.
(Krishna SinhaChaudhury can be contacted at krishna.s@ians.in)
--IANS
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