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How Xiaomi Became India’s Top Smartphone Maker

The Chinese smartphone now shares the top spot with Samsung.

Signage for Xiaomi Corp. is illuminated inside one of the company’s stores in Hong Kong. (Photographer: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg)
Signage for Xiaomi Corp. is illuminated inside one of the company’s stores in Hong Kong. (Photographer: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg)

Apple may have launched an iPhone X, Google its new flagship Pixel device and HMD Global is trying to resurrect the once-iconic brand of Nokia devices. All these companies might want to take a leaf out of Xiaomi’s book, considering that the Chinese technology company caught up with Samsung to become India’s top smartphone maker last quarter.

Xiaomi and Samsung managed to capture a 23.5 percent market share each in the quarter ended September, according to the latest quarterly mobile phone tracker report by International Data Corporation. Xiaomi’s shipments nearly tripled year-on-year and doubled over the previous three months.

It pulled off the feat by focusing on traditional channels for marketing its smartphones in India, IDC said. And it caught up with Samsung when the tech giant had a “record breaking quarter” itself, registering a 39 percent sequential growth and 23 percent year-on-year.

When it comes to pricing, Xiaomi had taken an aggressive approach and that seems to have worked for the Chinese smartphone maker, IDC’s Navkendar Singh told BloombergQuint. The company shipped a record 9.2 million devices in India last quarter.

“Redmi Note 4 has been the top-selling model for the last four quarters now,” he said. When Xiaomi started in 2014, they held a lot of flash sales online, they were a very online dominated player. They started going offline in the past three to four quarters and that has worked well for them.”

Watch the full interview with IDC’s Navkendar Singh here.