Disruptive SmartPhone Maker Xiaomi started sales in India with the Flash sales model. First flash sale in 2014, 250-300k people showed up interest on FlipKart’s website. Entire sale was over in 2 seconds (10k units). The initial buyer profile was young adults, active on social media and tech savvy, wanting the best phone at affordable price but not brand conscious.
Started with Flipkart – best sale 100,000 units in 4 seconds – then started with Airtel for a partnership on 4G partnership. In 2015, rolled out the partnership with Amazon, Snapdeal and The Mobile store. In June 2015, enabled sales through Mi.com. The authorized partners sell it on Mi.com. Starting to get a substantial amount of traffic on Mi.com. During recent Diwali sale, the company got more than 1 million unique visitors every single day. No money spent till now on advertising for Mi.com. Most promotion driven by word of mouth and social media.
Xiaomi has been building India-specific features as an area of differentiation. Have announced 4 features which are India specific: (1) recognize service SMS and notify those separately since 90% of the SMS are service related; (2) scale up after sales service – own after sales service including the call-center, other than Samsung, no brand does their own after sales service. Have 60 live exclusive service centers in India, which should grow to 150 by mid 2016. Even offer on-site pickup for handset services; (3) Tailored products for India – Mi 4i is an India-specific product, with 112 language support. Reduce the lead-time between China and India launches. (4) Software-related features tailored to the market – like customized ways to copy One-Time-Passwords from SMS to any webpage or App.
Xiaomi – Made in India – Started with its own first model in July 2015, with the Redmi-2 which is the highest selling SKU for Xiaomi. 100% of Redmi 2 Prime for India is made in India. They used a plant in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh near Chennai. Found that Andhra government was quite supportive and gave single window clearance.
Xiaomi India Product Line – The portfolio in four different buckets. One is smartphone. Second portfolio is TV – set top box. Third is WiFi routers. Fourth is Mi band, power banks, eco-system, water purifiers. The first three classes are Xiaomi’s own products while the fourth class cloud have products with partners as well.