Want to bring all our core products to India, says Xiaomi president Bin Lin

Chinese handset maker Xiaomi, or Mi, will work with skeletal operations in India, but use the country’s massive social media platforms to market its smartphone range. Having launched devices at half or even one-third the price of established brands in similar categories, co-founder and president Bin Lin told ET’ that Mi will continue to use the e-commerce platform to sell its devices. India will be one of Mi’s top growing markets worldwide where Lin plans to also bring the brand’s smart TV and routers. Edited excerpts:


What is your strategy in India this year? Any short-term goals?

The most important goal over the next six months is to learn about everything including hardware, software, product features and themes that Indian consumers need.

We’re willing to build a team here that understands their (consumers) needs to begin with and at a higher level, have a team that would build features for the Indian market. Having great services is another important aspect of our business. We will perfect our service, repair and after sales services over the next six months.

How critical is India as a market for Mi?

As a company, we have phone and tablet in one category, set-top box and smart TV in another, and then we have routers business. These categories will be our focus for the next three years.
India is one of the most important countries for us and we want to bring all the core products that we build to India, as soon as we can.


What kind of market share are you aiming to reach in India within a year?

Our key performance indicators are measures of customer satisfaction, how fast we can deliver the phones and the speed of repair. India is a very competitive market where people desire great products at affordable prices. If we get the services and after sales correct, the market share will follow.

How much will you spend on marketing this year?

Up until last year, we had no marketing budget.

Since we didn’t have money to spend on marketing, we used social media, which has worked very effectively. We want to do the same in India. We tried elevator ads in China last year and 1-minute TV ads, but when we take that money spent divided by the total handsets we sold – 18 million – it’s very tiny.

We have more than 100 million users on Facebook and several million on Twitter, in India. It won’t be a smart move if we don’t leverage powerful social media and instead focus on traditional media.


You said you don’t want to be a ‘Chinese company’ here. Comment.

We want to be a global company that leaps really close to consumers worldwide. That’s the cornerstone of our business model which is helped by e-commerce which allows us to reach consumers directly, without the layers of distribution channels. By doing so, we can be agile, make changes in our products and continue to move forward.

I’ve been in Google and Microsoft, great companies but I have also seen their mistakes when going into different countries. We want to build a company that invests heavily into R&D in India, finding the best people in the country, build products for people in this country. Whatever we learn in China, we find an Indian recipe and make variations for the Indian market. For instance, cash on delivery, which works brilliantly here but does not work in China at all.