China's top cellphone maker Xiaomi is planning to make its cellphones in India, and has hired legal experts to study the regulatory aspects of its plan, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company started selling its cellphones in India which generated substantial sales, making it an important market. For four months, the company has sold more than 500,000 units. Even if that number is just 20 percent of the global sales, Xiaomi predicted that India could become one of its strongest markets in the region by 2017.
"We always thought that our manufacturing would be based out of China," said head of Xiaomi's Indian arm, Manu Jain. "But India is beginning to become so important for us that we started to think whether we should set up our manufacturing."
Xiaomi is careful in its decision after Nokia suspended the operations of its factory in southern India due to tax disputes.
Meanwhile, the company has started migrating some of the data of its non-Chinese users to servers outside Beijing to Amazon servers based in the United States and Europe. The movement came after privacy issues were raised by security firms.
In charge of the migration is former Google executive Hugo Barra, who is now Xiaomi's vice president. He explained in a blog post that, aside from addressing privacy concerns, the migration is also necessary to boost the speed of the overseas servers in Singapore, India and Malaysia.
"Our primary goal in moving to a multi-site server architecture was to improve the performance of our services for Mi fans around the world," Barra wrote. "This is a very high priority for Xiaomi as we expand into new markets over the next few years."
