Xiaomi Opens 2000th Exclusive Mi Rural Store

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  • The company is aggressively expanding in the offline sales channel in India
  • Xiaomi as per several reports is the leader in smartphone space in the county

Xiaomi has announced opening of its 2000 Mi store in Rural India. Manu Kumar Jain, global VP, Xiaomi took to Twitter to announce the same. He specifically mentioned that Xiaomi’s Mi store count went to 2000 from 1000 in 15 weeks time.

Jain’s tweet read, “We opened our 2000th exclusive rural Mi Store today. 600+ cities, 28 states, 4000+ jobs, 2000+ Mi Stores. Proud of our offline team. Went from 1000 to 2000 stores in 15 weeks! Heartfelt thanks to all our partners.”

Xiaomi’s offline sales head has joined Realme India

Interestingly, Xiaomi’s ex-sales head Deepak Nakra has recently joined Realme Mobiles team in the country. It is to be noted here that Xiaomi and Realme are competitors in the smartphone market in India.

Deepak has joined Realme India as its offline sales head. As a matter of fact, Realme is also expanding its presence in the offline sales channel in the country. Both Xiaomi and Realme started as online heavy brands before expanding into the offline space.

The offline channel, as per IDC, had a rather muted year with a modest 6.7 per cent annual growth in 2018 and growing 5 per cent sequentially in 2018 Q4. The offline channel was unable to keep pace with the deep discounts and go-to-market initiatives from the e-tailers almost throughout the year. Having said that, offline remains the largest channel for mobile phone distribution in India and is crucial for the long-term success for any brand in India.

Realme and Xiaomi

Realme, as per a recent report by IDC, entered the top five vendor list at fourth position on the back of its affordable and aggressively priced Realme 2 and Realme 2 Pro series. The brand also moved from the fourth position in 2018 Q3 to the second position in the online space with a share of 17.3 per cent in 4Q18. The brand plans to extend its footprint into offline channel initially through Large Format Retail Stores like Reliance Digital and gradually scale up to traditional brick and mortar stores.

Xiaomi, on the other hand, continued to dominate, growing YoY by 28.6 per cent in 2018 Q4 on back of its affordable Redmi series devices aided by high decibel marketing campaigns and offline expansion with its Mi preferred partner program and opening of rural stores. Xiaomi’s Redmi 5A and Redmi Note 5/Pro series emerged as the fastest selling devices of 2018 across brands driving 10 million shipments each in the entire year.

Author – Mukul Yudhveer Singh. An avid reader, Mukul finds peace in books and technology. He’s as passionate about writing as he is about playing cricket and hitting the gym. If not writing or reading, you will most likely find him drawing tattoo designs or analyzing political campaigns.

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