Xinomi All Set For The Big Game

After displacing Samsung from pole position in smartphones, Xiaomi aims for a bigger play in Indian consumer durables.

- Sumant Banerji

A LITTLE AFTER NOON ON JULY 22, 2014, the website of India’s largest online marketplace Flipkart crashed. Over half a million users had logged in to get their hands on a Mi3 smartphone being launched by a then relatively unknown Chinese brand – Xiaomi. The entire stock of 10,000 units was sold out in minutes. Exactly a week later, Xiaomi had another online flash sale. This time round, it sold 10,000 smartphones in less than five seconds.

Xiaomi had brought to India the concept of flash sales that it had pioneered in China. It used this strategy to launch a series of bestseller mobile devices. “That is when we realised we were on the right path. If half a million people turn up without any advertising but through word of mouth publicity, then we were clearly doing something right,” says the 37- year- old Manu Jain, Managing Director of Xiaomi India, who is also a Vice President at the parent firm in China.

The flash sales were just the beginning of Xiaomi’s rise in India. “Before Xiaomi nobody knew about flash sales in India where you have limited number of units on sale. This creates a kind of euphoria about the product,” says Upasana Joshi, Associate Research Manager, Client Devices, IDC India. “It goes out of stock in a few minutes. It helped a lot in creating hype and generating demand.”

From selling a little over 10,000 devices in a few seconds in 2014, Xiaomi overtook Samsung to emerge as India’s largest-selling smartphone brand in the last quarter of 2017. In the first quarter of 2018, it reinforced the lead with a five percentage point lead over Samsung. It accounted for 31 per cent of smartphone sales as opposed to Samsung’s 26 per cent.