Journey of XIAOMI: India’s №1 smartphone brand.
A tech company which was founded in China in 2010 by Lui Jun entered in the market of India in late 2013 when the dominance in the industry was with tech giants Samsung and Micromax.
However, Xiaomi decided not to go like Samsung and other smartphone manufacturers but it adhered its goal of providing feature rich affordable smartphones and other small gadgets. There were other competitors like Intex, Spice, Lava trying to develop innovative products for customers so Xiaomi also initiated itself with launch of their first smartphone Mi3 in India which was very popular in China at that time because of its mid-range price and quality specifications. As the result Mi3 became very popular and a very new concept of “affordable flagship” emerged in India. Other OEMs started the same concept after witnessing the success of Xiaomi.
Instead of going through the offline stores Xiaomi also introduced a different approach of e-commerce “The Flash Sale” which was exciting, surprising and new to all Indians. Xiaomi started selling smartphones at 2:00 PM in flash sales for which everyone started waiting for buying phones. But there was a glitch that e- commerce website like Flipkart couldn’t bear the heavy traffic and many times sale went down due to server issues. But they managed to sell 1M smartphone within first six months in India.
After the grand success of Mi3 Xiaomi continued its way of selling its other flagship smartphones like Mi4, Redmi Note 2, Mi5, Mi 4i etc in the flash sales on e-commerce till 2015. Xiaomi also introduced some entry level smartphones like Redmi 1s and also they partnered with Indian telecoms for providing 4G technology at affordable price range. By the end of 2015 Xiaomi had introduced other products like Mi Power Bank, Mi Band, Mi earphones in India.
There were some challenges in front of the company like people started reporting the flash sale as fake sale policy and also after sale customer service was very poor but Xiaomi continued to work their best.
Till the end of 2015 Xiaomi had developed its faith in the people of India by providing quality in the affordable segment but Xiaomi didn’t stop there. They planned to start their offline stores and also Xiaomi focused on MAKE IN INDIA program and established their first manufacturing unit in India. In first quarter of 2016, Xiaomi introduced its most advanced mid-range smartphone Redmi Note 3 along with Mi Max in India and Redmi Note 3 became very popular among the people and it forwarded Xiaomi for launching the successor Redmi Note 4 in Jan 2017 which became the “ Best Selling Smartphone of 2017 in India” of which 6 millions units were sold in only six months.
Xiaomi always kept the budget of an average customer but it also launched high end flagships like Mi Max 2 and Mi Mix 2 which was a beauty without bezel. Xiaomi also introduced Mi A1 Android One smartphone which also became very popular in India.
In this competition Indian OEMs like Micromax, Lava left behind and big companies like Samsung, Motorola couldn’t provide the need of common people of India in within the price range of Xiaomi.
As the result in the last week of Jan 2018 Xiaomi became №1 smartphone brand in India.
