Chinese firm Xiaomi that has entered the Indian market last month with the launch of three smartphones of which the yesteryear flagship phone Mi3 has gained a lot of momentum. The handset has created a buzz in the Indian market selling like hot cakes.
In a recent development, the company announced on Wednesday that it will be selling 20,000 units of the Xiaomi Mi3 smartphone on August 12 and this will be the fourth lot of sale in the country.
Initially, the handset went on sale on July 22 and the stocks were empty in about 40 minutes. Later, the device again enter sale on July 29 and this second batch lasted only for a mere 5 seconds. Following these two attempts, the young China based vendor let the sale of Mi3 for the third time in order to bring hope to the frustrated consumers. This happened on August 5, but it was super short during which Xiaomi sold 15,000 units of the handset in a couple of seconds and for the same the firm received about 15,000 registrations.
According to the Xiaomi’s statistics, the firm has so far sold 35,000 units of the Mi3 handset in the first three batches of sale. To shoot up this figure, they have opened the registrations for the fourth batch that has debuted on August 5 at 6 PM. For those 20,000 units that were announced, the firm has received an astonishing 75,000 registrations in a day. It is highly recommended that the registered users will have to logged in 2 to 3 hours before the sale debuts on August 12 at 2 PM.
These sales figures clearly hint that Xiaomi has underestimated the demand that it has received in India. So far, none of the other China based offerings have been so successful in the market creating headlines almost everyday regarding their sales.
To make this clear, Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra has stated to BGR India that, they did not expect such huge sales from the India market and has apologized for the same to the consumers who are waiting to get their hands on the Xiaomi Mi3.
Admitting the shortage in the supply, he explains that, “We apologize for frustrating consumers in India and I say that with a hand on my heart. We are doing everything possible to improve. We completely underestimated the demand in India. We opened our Facebook page a month before the launch and we used the interaction there to judge the demand. We have used the same model in every market. At the launch date we had less than 10,000 followers. Even on our website we had thought getting 100,000 followers would be easy. But that didn’t happen. India is a different market where word of mouth spreads.”
While this is the case with the Mi3, the availability details of the Redmi 1S and Redmi Note is set to debut later this month and we do not expect the same kind of mishap in the case of these smartphones as well.
