Xiaomi Opens its first Mi Home store in Delhi-NCR

Xiaomi on Thursday unveiled an exclusive ‘Mi Home’ retail store at Ambience Mall, Gurugram, targeting the offline retail sector for the upcoming festive season. “The store would be thrown open for the public on August 19 at 10 am,” Vice President, Xiaomi and Managing Director, Xiaomi India, Manu Jain told IANS here.Xiaomi has primarily been an online-exclusive brand but it aggressively stepped up its offline presence across India this year via its ‘Mi Home’ stores, ‘Mi Preferred Partner’ (PP) stores and ‘Large Format Retailer’ (LFR) partners.

“Till last year, the offline numbers used to be less than 10 per cent. It fell down to about 5 per cent in the beginning of this year with the release of Redmi ‘Note 4’ because it was an online-exclusive model. We then started re-builing our offline journey and for the first time, in July 2017, we crossed 20 per cent,” Jain informed.

“We have 600 ‘Mi Preferred Partners’ right now and want to take it 20 cities by October. We want to take it to 1,500 stores across 30 cities by the end of this year,” said Jain.

Xiaomi has also begun carrying out pilot programmes in rural areas that have limited reach and less exposure to e-commerce sites. Currently, the programme is being tested in Karnataka where the company is working with retailers in a different way.

Xiaomi ships its products to over 14,000 pin codes — close to 40 percent of the country’s total — every single week. “We are now present in more than 8,500 stores via our innovative offline distribution network. Last year was indeed a great year and we achieved several milestones while building our India story,” Jain had earlier told IANS. “Besides, we are adding more Mi Homes. We had said we want to have 100 Mi Homes in 2 years. We already have 3 in Bengaluru and the next one is coming up in Delhi-NCR,” he said.

Xiaomi, which competes with the likes of Samsung, Lenovo, vivo and Oppo in India, is confident of clocking revenues in excess of US $2 billion (Rs 12,867 crore) from its India operations this year, doubling its top-line over 2016.