Friday, March 17, 2017

Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 now available for pre-orders in offline stores in India


Presently, 90 percent of Xiaomi’s sales are from online channels, while less than 10 percent is offline. However, that is set to change as the company looks to expand footprints in the offline market. Xiaomi is now launching a pre-ordering facility for its offline users. The service is available in the offline markets in the northern region, as well as large format retailers (LFRs) across the southern region. This basically means, customers will be able to book a Mi smartphone before it launches, in physical stores similar to the pre-bookings that you have been making for Xiaomi phones on Mi.com or Flipkart. The popular Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 recently crossed the milestone of 1 million units sold within 45 days in India. The smartphone will be going on sale at an MRP of Rs. 11,499 onwards.

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.

ALSO READ: Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 With Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Launched In India, Price Starting At Rs 9,999: Specifications And Features

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.

ALSO READ: Xiaomi Redmi 4A To Launch In India On March 20: Price, Specifications And Features

“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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