New Delhi: Chinese handset maker Xiaomi on Tuesday sold 20,000 Mi 3 smartphones on Flipkart within 2.4 seconds. The massive success witnessed by Xiaomi's fourth flash sale on the online retail platform makes Mi3 one of the the hottest selling smartphones in the market.
Flipkart's big Xiaomi Mi 3 flash sale started at 2 PM yesterday and millions had already registered for just 20,000 Mi 3 handsets.
With this, Xiaomi has sold a total of 55,000 units in India, with 20,000 sold in the first two flash sales, 15,000 in the next and 20,000 were sold in today's sale.
However, Xiaomi is consumer flak for providing lower number of units for the flash sale. Flipkart has received just 55,000 handsets to serve their 3-lakh-plus Mi 3 fans for the four flash sales this far.
The Xiaomi Mi 3 went on sale on July 22, and the company had claimed to receive around 100,000 registrations by July 21 itself. Only registered users could buy the device the next day. As soon as the Mi 3 went live on the site, Flipkart couldn't handle the traffic and the site crashed temporarily. Within 40 minutes, Flipkart claimed the Mi 3 was out of stock, but the site promptly said it would bring in the next batch on July 29 while the registration would begin on July 28. And to top it all, the second batch apparently sold in five seconds. The third batch took a record two seconds and the fourth batch was sold out in 2.4 seconds yesterday.
As per reports, Xiaomi is taking things slowly in order to avoid big mistakes. According to its management, the company may increase its stock quantities steadily, as has been seen in the last two sales. However, the number of units offered for sale is still pretty below the number of pre-registrations that it is getting.
It seems like Xiaomi's model of low-cost phones, superior software, and a combination of sales, marketing and branding strategies, is doing the trick for the handset maker. The Beijing-based group recently surpassed Samsung as the top-selling smartphone brand in China. A relatively obscure name abroad, the nascent company is now the world's fifth-largest smartphone maker.
In the past year, Xiaomi's sales in China have jumped from 4.4 million to 15 million units, according to a report published Monday by the technology research firm Canalys. This is far higher than the Korean tech giant Samsung, which had held the second spot in the Chinese smartphone market, with 13.2 million devices, down from 15.5 million a year ago.
The Xiaomi Mi 3 offers a 5-inch full-HD LCD display (1080x1920 pixels) offering a pixel density of 441ppi. It is powered by a 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (MSM8274AB) processor coupled with 2GB of RAM and Adreno 330 GPU. The device runs a highly tweaked version of Android 4.4 KitKat, called MIUI version 5.
The Mi 3 is listed with 16GB of inbuilt storage with no expandable storage support. It sports a 13-megapixel rear camera featuring a f/2.2 aperture and dual-LED flash while the front houses a 2-megapixel camera. It is backed by a 3050mAh battery. The Mi 3 measures 144x73.6x8.1mm and weighs 145 grams. It will be available in Metallic Grey colour.
The next sale begins on August 19, registrations for which began 6 pm on Tuesday on Flipkart. The number of devices that will be available for purchase was not shared by the company till Tuesday evening.
