Xiaomi is beginning this service with the Redmi Note 4, which will be available via pre-orders between March 14-17 across LFRs, and from March 16-21 across offline stores in Delhi, Jaipur and Chandigarh. On March 18, the smartphone will go on sale across all offline retailers, and Delhi, Jaipur and Chandigarh will get the phone at physical stores from March 22. Xiaomi’s offline partners include Sangeetha, Poorvika, Lot Mobile and BigC. While the offline pre-orders will kick off with Redmi Note 4, Xiaomi aims to spread the facility to all its smartphones in India.
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In order to make the pre-booking, customers do not need to carry or show any documents. All they need to do is to go to the listed stores and pre-book a device by paying a booking amount of Rs 1,000. The handset pre-booked at Sangeetha, Poorvika, BigC and Lot Mobiles can be picked up by customers from March 18 onwards, and the ones pre-booked in Delhi will be available March 22 onwards. For Jaipur and Chandigarh the pre-booked handsets can be picked starting March 24.
“We spent 2016 building strong operations in our offline distribution and paving the way to bring innovation in our offline model. We started this with our direct-to-retail model and with the introduction of pre-orders, we are extending our innovation to everyone,” Vipin Raina, head of offline sales, Xiaomi India said.
Further, it makes sense why Xiaomi has begun the facility with the Redmi Note 4. The smartphone has been immensely popular in the country, with Xiaomi managing to sell one million units of the Redmi Note 4 in 45 days since the first sale on January 23, 2017 in India. Plus, this would only bring Xiaomi closer to it India head Manu Jain’s roadmap for the sales of Redmi Note 4, where he envisions to sell as many as 7 million units of the Redmi Note 4 in 2017.
As said earlier, Xiaomi has largely been present in the online space. But over the past few months, the company has been focusing on increasing its presence in the offline market as well. It may be recalled that Xiaomi had launched an offline-exclusive smartphone, Redmi 3s Plus, in October last year. The smartphone was a spin-off of its then popular Redmi 3s series.
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“Till now, our focus was on online sales. Now, we will focus both on online and offline distribution. We expect our share from offline to grow from current 10 percent to 20-25 percent by the end of this year. This is our aspiration,” Xiaomi India Head Manu Kumar Jain said last month.
Xiaomi’s offline focus comes at a time when companies like Vivo and OPPO have gained a large chunk of the smartphone market in a very short period of time by just focusing on the offline segment. The two Chinese brands have gained roughly 18 percent market share and have been giving the market leader Samsung a hard time. The two companies started off from mere 1 percent of the market in 2015.
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