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Xiaomi is gearing to launch one more thing in India soon & no it isn't the Redmi Note 5: News, News

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Xiaomi, it seems, is aware and clearly in no mood to settle down either. The company is gearing to launch one more thing in India, in the days to come.
Xiaomi has been on a roll lately, especially in India. According to data released by research firm IDC, Xiaomi has joined hands with Samsung to become the number one smartphone company in the country for the quarter (Q3) ended September. Some would say, things would get harder now: the company needs to maintain the momentum after all. Xiaomi, it seems, is aware and clearly in no mood to settle down either. The company is gearing to launch one more thing in India, in the days to come. It’s been a busy year for Xiaomi.
While the company has been busy launching Android-based smartphones and announcing the opening of Mi Home stores across the country, all by the dozen, Xiaomi’s upcoming device or product or initiative will be a little different. So it seems. This new upcoming device or product or initiative will be geared exclusively towards the rural market. Xiaomi VP and India MD Manu Kumar Jain has been on a mission exploration lately, and has been connecting and meeting with village folk during his “field trip across villages.”
“Gained insights on the way people lead their lives in rural India. Fingers crossed for a new product that I believe will help change their lives,” Manu writes on Twitter.
A couple of days ago, the Xiaomi India head shared a quick teaser hinting at something the company will be launching soon, and that it will have an India context. No further details were shared. Now it seems, the product or device or initiative is one that will be specifically targeted towards the rural market. This could be anything ranging from an entry-level feature phone to entry-level smartphone to an ecosystem product designed to help the rural masses or Xiaomi extending its reach there via local stores, in a way a certain Oppo and Vivo (and home-grown brands like Micromax) can, for now, muster.
Also Read: Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 with bezel-less design & dual rear cameras may launch soon
Although we do not know for sure, the product in question could be anything, but the alleged Redmi Note 5. We can expect Manu to make things clearer in the days to come, and the launch will hopefully happen soon enough. But having conquered most of the towns and cities, Xiaomi’s next frontier seems to be going deeper into the country: in villages where a majority of people are still wary of using a smartphone.
Xiaomi’s tryst with online (flash) sales has become a gold standard as far as businesses are concerned. The company — that sort of pioneered the strategy of online flash sales – entered India only three years ago and already it has caught up with Samsung, the South Korean giant that has been here for a very long time now.
After having marked its presence – via online sales – Xiaomi started building its offline business aggressively from Q1 2017 ushering in a three pronged strategy for the same which involves Large Format Retailer partners, Mi Preferred Partner stores and our own Mi Home stores. The company plans on opening as many as 200 Mi Home stores in the country in the next two years. And it’s looking to connect them as aggressively under what it calls its O2O strategy (Online to Offline and vice versa) and through it, it aims to direct traffic from its online channels such as mi.com/in to its offline channels and direct the traffic back to mi.com from its offline stores.
It would be interesting to see what Xiaomi has in store for India in the days to come. Even more so because tapping into the Internet connected urban market maybe easy, the same isn’t true about rural India.

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