Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has decided to aggressively expand its offline presence in the Indian smartphone market. The company has received a remarkable response for its smartphones in India, especially its Redmi Note 4 and Redmi 4 devices.

By introducing affordable phones with decent specifications, Xiaomi has managed to capture a chunk of the Indian market via online flash sales. Last year, the company also expanded to offline Mi Home Stores and Preferred Partner Stores to sell their devices. In their venture to expand, the company is taking on Samsung, which has maintained a good chunk of the Indian market.

Xiaomi Offline Expansion

Last year, the Chinese smartphone maker widened their product lineup and made a presence in the offline retail market. Starting with expansion to power banks and fitness bands, Xiaomi moved on to opening Mi Home Stores across tier 1 cities. Also, the company has created Mi Preferred Partner Stores who stock and sell Xiaomi devices.

Manu Kumar Jain, Managing Director, Xiaomi India told Reuters, “We want to improve on whatever we launched in 2017 and also launch and plug whatever we think are the big use cases where we are not present.” He has also confirmed the company’s plan to launch 6 to 8 new smartphones across various segments.

The company had set targets for its offline expansion for 100 Mi Home Stores and is already ahead of schedule. The company currently has 17 such stores set up already. With the affordable smartphone segment booming, Xiaomi could use them to launch more affordable smartphones. Currently, the company has a lineup of devices ranging between Rs. 4,999 to Rs. 32,999.

As we’ve seen after the arrival of Jio Phone, companies have gone to phones priced under Rs. 5,000 to get the feature phone audience migrated. We expect Xiaomi to pull off a similar move in collaboration with some telco or even as a standalone project.