Xiaomi Mi3 will be available for sale once again in India via Flipkart next Tuesday after its first four batches were sold out in seconds.
If anyone missed the first four chances of purchasing Xiaomi Mi3 in India, fret not, Flipkart will open its digital store once again next week. Xiaomi is following Motorola's strategy of selling its budget-friendly smartphone online. After defeating the world smartphone champ Samsung with impressive sales in China during the most recent quarter, the Chinese smartphone giant is opening up to Indian buyers.
The Indian consumer market values cost-effective, feature-packed smartphones. For Xiaomi, which has long been a China-exclusive brand, India serves the purpose for pushing its high-end smartphones with cheaper price tags. The phone-maker is already enjoying a successful response from buyers in the world's second largest populous country.
Xiaomi launched its Mi3 flagship in India last month exclusively through the Flipkart online retail store, a strategy that was used by Motorola to push its affordable Moto G smartphones off the shelves. While Moto G was a mid-range smartphone with reasonable specs, Xiaomi's Mi3 packs high-end features in an affordable price range. In the first batch sale on Flipkart, the handset was sold out in less than half an hour. But as the smartphone's popularity grew, the consecutive three batches sold out in five seconds two seconds and 2.4 seconds, respectively.
Xiaomi started off with 20,000 units of Mi3 in the first two batches and reduced the third batch to 15,000 units. Owing to the significant demand, the company returned to 20,000 units in its fourth batch. Xiaomi said it underestimated the demand for its highly feature-packed Mi3 in India.
"We knew India was going to be big, but we grossly underestimated the demand. No one had any clue. This was a new geography. These are India-specific handsets and there is a limitation to ramp up the production line in China," he company's India head Manu Kumar Jain told Financial Express.
The company plans to ramp up the production of the handsets to comply with the growing demand for Mi3 in India.
Xiaomi Mi3 will be available once again at 6 p.m. IST on Tuesday, August 19 in India, through Flipkart. Registrations are mandatory before purchasing the handset. The price of the smartphone in Indian currency is INR 13,999 or around $229.
