Xiaomi India Opens its First Mi Home Store in Bengaluru, 100 More Store Opening Soon

Earlier this year, Xiaomi announced that it had crossed $1 billion in revenue in India for the during 2016. It achieved this feat in just a couple of years after entering the country. While Xiaomi is the dominant player in the online market, it lacks the traction in the offline world. However, there are few offline focused Chinese players like OPPO and Vivo, which have penetrated into every nook and corner of the country. Even Xiaomi started selling their devices via offline stores, but they never invested as much as Vivo or OPPO. Now in 2017, the company has opened its first ever retail store called Mi Home in India in Bengaluru.

Though it was open for Media, the company announced to make it available for public starting May 20th. The Mi Fans can pre-book the devices from May 16th to 19th by paying a small amount of Rs. 1,000 to get picked up from Mi Home store. As the company is expecting a huge crowd on May 20th, they can assure the stock by those who pre-booked, however, the public can still get the devices by directly visiting the store. In the case of no stock, the store will be issuing an F-code for immediately purchasing the device through Mi.com.

The new Mi Home store will be selling the online exclusive devices at the same price as on their official website. Xiaomi see’s the Mi Home as an offline avatar of the Mi.com which is said to be one of the largest single brand online retail stores. The upcoming Mi Store will be located in New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai. If everything goes good, we might see 100 Mi Home stores in the next two years. Apart from opening the Mi Home stores, the company also continues to expand its offline presence through its Direct to Retail model.

With the Direct to Retail model, the company tries to minimize the middleman costs. A couple of months back, the company announced its popular mid-range smartphone, Redmi Note 4 to be available via branded retail outlets like Sangeetha Mobiles, Lot Mobiles, and BigC. The 3GB RAM variant of the device which is selling at Rs. 9,999 on online stores is retailing at a slightly higher price of Rs. 11,499 through these retail outlets. Even Huawei’s Honor which was launched as an online exclusive brand has entered the offline market. Back in January, OnePlus also opened its first ever experience store in India in Bengaluru.