When Xiaomi started its smartphone business, the company basically had just the online marketing strategy. However, over the past few years, Xiaomi has put more effort into its offline market. The company has opened many offline stores, especially in China and India. In November last year, Lu Weibing, Xiaomi Group’s Vice President and the General Manager of Redmi Brand made a comment regarding Xiaomi Mi Store. He said, “In the coming year, every county will have a Xiaomi Home (Mi Store) so that every Mi fan has a Xiaomi home around.”
Now, a recent report from GizmoAlpha claims that Xiaomi recently unveiled over a thousand stores across China. The interesting part of the report is that Xiaomi opened the Mi Stores simultaneously. For Lu Weibing, the plethora of new stores has three major advantages for Xiaomi’s business in China
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- Firstly, the opening shows that Xiaomi is now closer to everybody and it has a new model of offline retail.
- Secondly, the “thousand stores” signifies that Xiaomi has become a new force in the retail industry.
- Finally, the “simultaneous opening of thousands of stores” means that Xiaomi is about to embark on a new starting point on the battlefield in China.
Xiaomi Mi Store now in every province in China
According to him, Xiaomi did not just open thousands of stores in the same locality. The new Mi Stores are spread across 30 provinces and 270 cities. This is quite a good spread for the Chinese manufacturer. Furthermore, these stores have multiple products and may not offer the same products. While some are specific to certain products (smartphones, Mi Homes, etc) others are mixed. It depends on the market preference in the city or province.
So far, the total number of stores of Mi Home in China is more than 2,000. For Xiaomi, this is pivotal in its quest for full coverage from city to county nationwide. In addition, Lu Weibing claims that this is just the starting point for Xiaomi. Its next target is to make sure that there is no county without a Xiaomi Store. Xiaomi will work with partners from all over the country to make the Mi Home open to every county in China, and truly realize that “Every Mi Fan has a Mi Home around”.
As absurd as this sounds, Xiaomi may have collaborated with many retailers to achieve this feat. Nevertheless, its always a good thing for the manufacturer to be closer to the fans.
