Xiaomi only announced itself in India this July, with a slight rebranding — Mi. The first smartphone to go on sale was the Mi 3, which the company sold at an extremely competitive price. This meant that people really got talking about the Chinese newcomer in the country.
Not many would’ve imagined the impending success that Xiaomi had for the taking. Just five months into operations in India, Xiaomi now report selling a total of one million smartphones. Considering that there had been a pause in sales following the ban imposed by the Delhi high court, besides the fact that five months is a relatively short time, one would assume these are good numbers.
Mi India’s Manu Kumar Jain
Gizchina News of the week
After selling the Mi 3 in limited numbers, Xiaomi announced the Redmi 1S, again with an extremely aggressive price tag. Thanks to the fact that the Redmi 1S was among the most affordable Snapdragon powered phones with 1GB RAM at the time of its first sale, the device sold like hot cakes, and continues to do well. Xiaomi are still only allowed to offer their Snapdragon powered devices for sale in India, which means that the Redmi 1S is an extremely important device for Xiaomi even now.
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Although the Redmi Note had gone on sale previously, Xiaomi had to stop offering the device thanks to the ban. As a workaround, Xiaomi are now offering the 4G LTE powered variant of the Redmi Note which is Snapdragon powered.
They sold a lot more unless they lied by a lot about the stock they had every week.
The claim is that they reached 1mil in Dec so it could be early dec not now but even that seems wrong given the units number they claimed each week.
Edit;
Went ahead and checked
they started sales on july 8 and in Q3 (july-sept) they sold some 335k units – 95k MI3 and 240k Redmi 1S
then in Q4
dec 23 Redmi 1S 50k units
dec 9 Redmi Note 75k units
dec 8 Redmi 1S open sales, lasted for some 3 days
dec 2 Redmi Note 50k units
nov 25 Redmi 1S 65k units
nov 18 Redmi 1S 65k units
nov 11 Redmi 1S 65k units
nov 4 Redmi 1S 100k units
oct 28 Redmi 1S 60k units
oct 21 Redmi 1S 90k units
oct 14 Redmi 1S 100k unis
oct 6 150k Redmi 1S and likely 25k Mi3 – Mi3 number based on import data
So Q4 up until now 895k units excluding the open sales of Redmi 1S for some 3 days.Those open sales could be 150k units or even 300k but lets say 150k
So Q4 so far 1.045 mil units
Total since july 8 is 1.380 million units- with the open sale event being an estimate,they could actually be anywhere from 1.3 to 1.5 mil units.
In any case they should have reached 1 million units in late Nov So the units numbers they claimed were for sale every week were not accurate.
Not sure why they keep lying , it only hurts their image and they have a poor image in some parts of the world as it is.
May not be 1 Million but surely they made a place for themselves in Indian market.