China's Xiaomi bets bigger on India retail stores amid Samsung rivalry

China’s Xiaomi will focus on boosting its India sales from retail outlets after years of big bets on e-commerce, its India president said, as the company seeks to revive smartphone sales after falling behind South Korea’s Samsung.

E-commerce sales in India via Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart have surged in recent years, helping Xiaomi and others expand in one of the world’s fastest-growing markets, with 600 million smartphone users.

But while 44 per cent of India’s smartphones sales are now online, the brick-and-mortar segment remains the bigger play and Xiaomi expects it to grow further.

“Our market position in offline is substantially lower than what it is online,” Xiaomi’s India head, Muralikrishnan B., said in an interview on Friday. “Offline is where you have other competitors who have been executing fairly well and have a larger market share.”

Just 34 per cent of Xiaomi’s India unit sales this year have come from retail stores, with the rest through websites that have long been its dominant sales generator, data from Hong Kong-based Counterpoint Research shows. Samsung, in contrast, gets 57 per cent of its sales from stores.

Xiaomi plans to expand its store network beyond the current 18,000 and increasingly partner with phone vendors to offer other products, such as Xiaomi TVs or security cameras, where Muralikrishnan said competition is less intense.

“We’ll continue to be confident ... that ultimately our position will be heard and validated,” Muralikrishnan said.