Xiaomi to put 40,000 Redmi 1S phones on sale on September 2

NEW DELHI: Xiaomi will put 40,000 handsets of the entry-level Redmi 1S smartphone on its next flash sale on September 2, the company said Thursday in a post on popular micro-blogging site Twitter.

The registrations for the Redmi 1S commenced Tuesday on Flipkart.com, the sole retailer of the Chinese company’s products in India.

Manu Jain, head of India operations at Xiaomi, told ET that the company is bringing in significantly higher numbers of the handset this time around, as it learns from the flash sales of Mi 3 smartphone. The Chinese smartphone maker has sold 95,000 Mi3 smartphones in India through six flash sales in a month so far, but has faced flak after supply was nearly a tenth of the demand.

Mi 3 won't available for a few weeks in the Indian market due to capacity issues.

According to Jain, Xiaomi’s entire focus would now be on the Redmi 1S, which is aggressively priced at Rs 5,999. The company is also trying to bring the Redmi Note in the next couple of weeks.

Xiaomi is ramping up service and call centers for the latest Redmi 1S and Redmi Note smartphones. “We are further ramping up the supply chain for our devices. The quantity of Redmi 1S smartphone will be significantly better as we further ramp it up”.

Xiaomi is also testing the Mi4 smartphone in India and expects to bring it around end-2014.