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Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is stepping on the gas to expand its offline presence, a channel that it expects will contribute to about 30 per cent of its sales in India by the end of the year.
The company, which sells its products through large format stores, multi-brand outlets as well as its own Mi Homes, saw about 20 per cent of its sales in India coming from offline retail during January-June 2017.
"In 2014, online sales of smartphones were about 12 per cent and that has now grown to about 33 per cent. We expect about 30-40 per cent of the smartphone sales in India to be online. That said, offline continues to be a dominant channel and we are expanding our presence there," Xiaomi India Head Manu Kumar Jain told reporters.
He added that the aim is to take the offline share to about 30 per cent by the end of the year.
"Via our three pronged strategy, we believe we are a truly integrated company when it comes to implementing our O2O strategy (online to offline and vice versa)," Jain said.
The company has seen a 10X growth in offline sales in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year.
Citing data from research firm IDC, Jain said Xiaomi has a 46.9 per cent share of the online smartphone market in India and 17.2 per cent share overall.
Jain said the company has partnered 12 large format retail chains that expanded Xiaomi's reach to 2,000 points.
"Apart from that, we have a preferred partners programme through which we reach over 600 points in 11 cities. The intent is now to scale that up to over 1,500 across 30 cities," he said.
Jain added that these points (in multi-brand stores) will be set up across capital cities of various states as well as tier I cities.
"Besides, we are adding more Mi Homes. We had said we want to have 100 Mi Homes in 2 years. We already have 3 in Bengaluru and the next one is coming up in Delhi-NCR," he said.
A few more Mi Homes will come up in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune.
Xiaomi, which competes with the likes of Samsung, Lenovo, vivo and Oppo in India, is confident of clocking revenues in excess of USD 2 billion (Rs 12,867 crore) from its India operations this year, doubling its top-line over 2016.