In a move to pep up its already astounding sales in India, Xiaomi is now reportedly testing an offline sales model to sell its phones via brick and mortar stores in partnership with Bharti Airtel.
As per Reuters, the current deal employs Airtel selling Xiaomi’s currently trending Redmi Note 4G handsets through its 133 retail stories across six major Indian cities. These cities include Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and its vicinity as well as in Kolkata. Xiaomi currently sells its handsets exclusive through Flipkart and has a reach to over 1000 cities.
Manu Jain, Xiaomi’s India head, told Reuters that if this model works out well for them, they’ll probably expand this partnership to more models and retail stores.
This recent move comes amid a legal tussle, initiated by Ericsson over patent infringement. The Delhi High court, which had earlier granted an ex-parte injunction against Xiaomi, then partially lifted the ban and allowed the world’s 3rd largest smartphone maker to continue sales of selected models equipped with Qualcomm processors.
Nevertheless, Xiaomi’s ever-vocal global VP Hugo Barra went on to announce that the company had successfully sold over a Million Mi handsets since it entered the Indian market through Flipkart’s online channels.
Xiaomi recently raised a huge $1.1 Billion investment, valuing the company at a staggering $45 Billion. This entire deal made Xiaomi, world’s 3rd biggest tech startup in terms of valuation.
