India to get twice as much Xiaomi retail presence in brick and mortar locations

Indeed, over the next few months, Xiaomi is planning on doubling their offline presence in India. Currently, 90 percent of their sales in the region are from online sources. With India being both a booming smartphone market, it’s no surprise that the Chinese smartphone maker would want to make their mid-range products available in as many physical locations as possible.

“For us, online is the dominant channel and we are trying to build a base for offline in India. We had a partnership with Redington last year (for distribution) and four weeks back, tied up with Innocomm and Just Buy Live,” Xiaomi India Head Manu Jain said in Mumbai.

By making these two partnerships, Xiaomi will be selling their products in up to 10,000 shops by late Q4 of 2016. Primary among these retailers will be Mi.com and Flipkart, which will be prominantly selling the Redmi 3S and Redmi 3S Prime.

India is an important market for Xiaomi. The company sells over 1 million phones every quarter in the region, so it makes sense that they would want to expand their physical presence.

“For the first sale that we did yesterday, we wanted to bring the highest possible quantity and we brought 90,000 units. Everything was added to cart in a few minutes and it took two-and-a-half hours to ship out everything,” Jain said.

What do you think of Xiaomi’s increased presence in the Indian market? Will the Chinese company be able to snag the bandwidth they need to become a dominant player in the market? Let us know your take in the comments below!