Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker, sees its offline sales going up significantly in India. Started off with just five per cent last year, the offline sales now reached one-third of its total sales, with the remaining coming from online sales.

“We expect this to go up to 50 per cent next year. We are going to expand our retail footprint significantly through our preferred partners,” Manu Jain, Managing Director of Xiaomi India, has said.

It has about 2,500 ‘preferred partners’ across the country. “We are going to add a few thousand more,” he said.

The firm emerged the top smartphone seller, pushing Samsung to second place. “We ship about 9-10 million pieces a quarter in the last three quarters,” he said.

“We have grown three times from the first quarter of last year to this year’s first quarter. We are sourcing almost all of the demand from the six factories that we tied up with in the country,” he said.

Jain was here on Wednesday in connection with the launch of its 1,000th service centre. “We have doubled our service centres from 500 in June 2017 to 1,000 this month, covering 600 cities. About 6,000 people work in these centres. We have shut down another 100 centres that we felt were not running up to the mark,” he said.

It also has 500 authorised service centres for its TVs in 300 cities.

He claimed that the Turn Around Time at the mobile service centres with 95 per cent of the cases getting resolved within 4 hours. “About 84 per cent of them were resolved in two hours,” he said.

He showcased the e-token generation system and online tracking of the queues at the centre to make it easy for the customers.

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