Why Xiaomi India Should Step up Availability of its Smartphones Now

The company should now seriously look at partnering with regional large format players and telecom select channel partners in order to increase its product availability in India.

With its unique online flash sales driven its entry into the Indian mobile market, Xiaomi surely carved a niche for itself in terms of offering great value for money to its customers with the help of maintaining a great balance between the right price points and feature sets.

Its online partnership with Flipkart made sure that its smartphones were available in the online space and its unique offerings on product specification with price points increased on its popularity.

Taking a cue from this success, Xiaomi has right moved on from being an “only online available” brand to actually moving inside the territory of traditional channel sales model by partnering with “TheMobileStore” one of the biggest success stories in the large format retail in India.

However, with its latest product announcements and keeping in mind the mass appeal that these product lines – new smartphone – Mi 4i (Xiaomi also introduced one of the cheapest wearable lies available in India in the form of Mi-Band) – the company now needs to further its reach by partnering with more such traditional telecom channel partners in India. This can ensure better availability as well as visibility of its product lines and make way gaining more market share.

Ratan Tata invests in Xiaomi

In a major development, Xiaomi has announced that Ratan Tata, chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, has made an investment in the company.

This is the first investment by any Indian into Xiaomi. In December last year, Xiaomi raised US$1.1 billion at a valuation of US$45 billion.
On 23 April, 2015, Xiaomi unveiled a new flagship smartphone Mi 4i in New Delhi, India. Over 1,500 Mi India fans packed the Siri Fort Auditorium to witness the presentation. In the first 2 days of registrations opening for the Mi 4i sale on Flipkart, more than 225,000 customers had registered to purchase the phone.

Mi 4i is a high-end flagship smartphone created especially for Indian consumers. Designed to fit perfectly in your hand, the Mi 4i (priced at Rs. 12,999) features a 5" 1080p Full HD screen with the all-new Sunlight Display.

A slim high-capacity 3120mAh battery powers the ultra-compact high quality phone, which can last for 1.5 days under normal usage. Mi 4i runs on a 2nd-generation Snapdragon 615 Octa-core 64-bit processor designed by Qualcomm India. It is a 4G dual sim, dual standby device, with 13MP camera, two-tone flash, and a 5Mp front camera.

Crafting such an incredible phone has been made possible only by close cooperation with leading suppliers and world-class manufacturing partners. Mi 4i has high quality components from top tier suppliers such as Qualcomm, Sony, Samsung, Sharp, JDI, Corning, and many others. Mi 4i is also Xiaomi's very first MIUI 6 device based on Android L.

Xiaomi has been growing rapidly in India after entering the market in July 2014. Analyst firm IDC ranked the company as the 5th-largest smartphone vendor in India in Q4 2014.

Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi, says: "Mr. Tata is one of the most well-respected business leaders in the world. An investment by him is an affirmation of the strategy we have undertaken in India so far. This is just the start of an exciting journey, and we are looking forward to bringing more products into India."