In only about six years, Xiaomi has been able to carve a name for itself in India by clocking incredible growth across segments. To take it further and, the company is adding three manufacturing plants in the country to increase production capacities as a part of the Make in India program.
At a virtual press conference today, Manu Kumar Jain announced that two new smartphone production facilities and one new smart TV plant have been added in India. With this, Xiaomi has managed to achieve 99% local manufacturing for phones and 100% local manufacturing for TVs, as of January 2021.
More than 30,000 employees are employed for smartphone manufacturing by Xiaomi.
The new factory in partnership with DBG is already operational in Haryana, allowing for a 20% increase in smartphone manufacturing capacity. The second new facility will be with BYD in Tamil Nadu and should go live by the first half of 2021. Not just that, Xiaomi also claims to have reached 75% component localization (by value) by sourcing parts such as PCBs, sub-boards, camera modules, back panels, cables, batteries and boxes from India. The figure is a little lower for higher-end devices.
Components such as chipsets, camera sensors, displays, etc. continue to be imported as they call for significantly higher levels of investments. Xiaomi says that Made-in-India smartphone manufacturing has been just shy of 100% as the initial batches of new devices are often imported till the facilities get ready for mass production. The pandemic made matters worse as the supply chain was disrupted.
More than 3 million Mi TVs have been sold in India to date. With the onboarding of Radiant Technology as a new manufacturing partner (in Telangana), 100% of the smart TVs sold by Xiaomi in India are now Made-in-India. Combined with the Dixon plant in Tirupati, more than 1,000 people are employed by these TV factories.
The objective of these additional facilities is to ramp up production and eventually meet domestic demand. In early 2020, Xiaomi even started exporting smartphones to countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh, but that had to be stopped due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The company expects the first quarter of 2021 to be very big for smartphones in India. Next week, it will launch the Redmi Note 10 series of budget smartphones to keep up with the demand.
Xiaomi has been the top smartphone company in India for 14 straight quarters with a 27% market share in 2020 Q4. Similarly, its smart TVs have been the segment leaders since the last 10 quarters. Xiaomi also enjoys a 52% market share in the wearables market. These figures have made it the third-largest eCommerce platform in India, after Amazon and Flipkart.