After e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart, Xiaomi has signed up 20,000 sq ft of office space in Bengaluru. The space, located in the IT hub of Marathahalli, will share the same campus as Inmobi, a mobile advertisement technology startup. Xiaomi’s R&D centre, which is being touted as the firm’s first R&D centre outside of China, will open in April. The Chinese device major is also planning to set up its own e-commerce platform during the second half of the year.
Xiaomi works as a startup with a skeletal staff and has presently 20 employees in India even as it has sold more than a million handsets until December last year. Most of the India-specific themes and content are being developed by Mi fans (Mi is its brand) for free and not by Xiaomi employees. For instance, Xiaomi phones will soon support Kannada and Tamil scripts, developed by Mi fans, while eight other Indian languages are on the anvil.
“We are excited about the new centre as we expand our operations in India. The demand in the country has always exceeded our expectations.
We will be bringing in more Mi products this year,” said Manu Jain, head of India operations at Xiaomi. The Mi TVs will be launched in the second half of the year, he said.
Meanwhile, Jain also defended the high price of Mi 4 (Rs 19,999) in India.
“The Mi 3 was sold in India for Rs 13,999, the first Mi phone to be sold in the country. “We sell at cost and as the same price as of China. We could not have brought down the price unless we compromised on the quality of components. The stainless steel we have used and the craftsmanship that went in to the design had caused the cost to go up,” he added.
