Xiaomi India set to cross $2-bn revenue mark, grow beyond smartphones

Xiaomi India will cross the $2-billion mark in revenues in the current financial year, its managing director Manu Kumar Jain has said.

Jain said the India business of the Chinese company is likely to sustain the same pace of growth next year. There will also be an increase in offline sales and new product launches beyond smartphones, he added.

The Xiaomi India MD also said that the company has notched up record sales this year in India, including sales of four million handsets in the one month period of Diwali, which is the first-ever for any smartphone brand in India. Last year, Xiaomi had sales of $1 billion and shared the number one position in the Indian smartphone market with Samsung in the last quarter.

"We are closing our books now, but pretty sure to exceed $2-billion this year. As far as market share is concerned, we have 50 per cent share in online sales and 23.5 per cent in the overall market and we became number one last quarter. We are looking for a leadership position in India for the long run," Jain told The Economic Times.

According to ET, Xiaomi India has made a regulatory filing in India to expand into several businesses such as payments bank, electric vehicles, consumer electronics and even lifestyle products.

Jain said Xiaomi has formed a dedicated product and R&D team to customise the products for the Indian market and even redesign them completely to make them suitable for India.

"For instance, our electric scooter will require a complete redesign since it's suitable for Chinese road conditions. Similarly, we need to add a storage tank in our water purifier to sell in India since consumers want storage capacity," said Jain.

In 2018, Xiaomi is going to enter two categories and is aggregating local content that will be bundled with its smart TV. "TV is a space where we want to enter. We are building the content by virtue of our stake in Hungama," he said.

The company has launched a slew of budget smartphones in India over the past couple of years, with the Redmi Note 4 emerging as one of the most popular buys at the lower end of the price spectrum.