Xiaomi sold quarter of a million smartphones in just 10 minutes in this country

While big giants are struggling to embark on India’s voluminous and fast-growing smartphone market, Chinese company Xiaomi continues to show unprecedented success.

Xiaomi says it sold over 250,000 Redmi 4 units in 10 minutes in India in what was the "biggest smartphone sale in the history" of the country, it claims. The smartphone went on sale in India on Monday through Flipkart and company’s own Mi.com website.

The Redmi Note 4, launched in India last week, is the successor to its highest selling smartphone in the country, the Redmi Note 3. At a media event in New Delhi, company’s outgoing executive Hugo Barra said Xiaomi sold 3.6 million units of Redmi Note 3 in India last year.

The Redmi Note 4 has improved camera sensors, battery life, display, sound quality and nearly everything that made the Redmi Note 3 such a big success in India. But most importantly, it offers a combination of hardware modules at a price that is hard to replicate and appeals to most Indians.

The Redmi Note 4 comes in three variants, sporting 2GB of RAM with 16GB of internal storage; 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage; and 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The three variants are priced at just Rs 9,999 ($150), 10,999 ($165) and 12,999 ($190) respectively. All the models are powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 625 SoC.

"Great momentum from the Redmi Note 3 has surely helped," Tarun Pathak of marketing research firm Counterpoint tells Mashable India. He expects the demands for the Redmi Note 4 to remain steady.

"The phenomenal response we have seen with the Redmi Note 4, once again indicates the trust and value that our customers place on Flipkart, when it comes to shopping for their favourite mobile phones,” Mr. Ajay Yadav, Head - Mobiles, Flipkart, said in a press statement.

Nearly two-and-a-half years after it entered India, Xiaomi is quickly becoming a dominant smartphone brand in the country. The company said earlier this month it crossed $1 billion annual revenue in the country for last year. Xiaomi was the third largest smartphone brand in India in Q3 2016, after selling over two million smartphones at an annual growth rate of 150 percent.

The company, which faces an increasingly growing competition in China from players such as Vivo and Huawei, is now eyeing to become India’s largest smartphone vendor, said CEO Lei Jun.

The reception that the Redmi Note 4 is getting is also impressive because the Indian smartphone market has seen a decline in sales in the past few months amid demonetisation. According to IDC, smartphone sales within the leading 50 cities of India dropped by 30.5 percent month on month in November 2016 over October 2016, for instance.