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With Its Second Indian Factory Ready, Xiaomi Can Produce A Million Phones Per Month

The Chinese smartphone maker has set up a second unit in Sri City.
Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Yesterday, at an event to announce the launch of Redmi 4A in New Delhi, Xiaomi also announced that it has set up a second manufacturing facility in India. The Chinese smartphone brand will be producing phones out of the factory, located in Sri City in Andhra Pradesh, in partnership with Foxconn.

Xiaomi's India head, Manu Kumar Jain, said that the new factory will have a phenomenal production rate of one phone per second.

Smartphone manufacturing factories are operational for 16 hours a day and even longer by some accounts. At the above mentioned rate, the factory will produce 3,600 phones in an hour or over 30,000 phones per day. This translates to a million phones produced in a month.

"We are growing at more than 100 percent each year. But the biggest thing still holding us back is supply, and we're trying to improve this. If you look at the past, with the Redmi 1S first sale we had 10,000 units, with Redmi 3S phones we had 90,000 units in the first sale. With Redmi Note 4, we had a quarter million units in the first sale. We said quarter million is an unimaginable number, but it went out of stock in ten minutes. So, really demand is difficult for us to predict," Jain said, speaking with the Indian Express.

Xiaomi scored big in the last quarter of 2016. With great festive season sales, it took the second spot in Indian smartphone market with a 10.7 percent share. For the whole of 2016, the company ended up in the fifth position with a 6.6 percent market share. That number is likely to go up with Xiaomi's early phone launches in 2017 as compared to last year.

IDC

In all likelihood, the company will be aiming to surpass local manufacturer Reliance Jio and a declining Micromax, and challenge Lenovo for the second place in the Indian market. Lenovo has two well performing brands, Lenovo and Moto, in the market, and one manufacturing unit in India.

"Over the years, a lot of brands have sunk and risen," Sudhin Mathur, Lenovo India Head told HuffPost India in an interview. "You have to understand what your users want. The dual brand strategy has worked for us very well after we acquired Moto in 2014."

Xiaomi has already sold a million Redmi Note 4 units and Lenovo has just launched the Moto G5 Plus amid high expectations. It will be a fight worth watching.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.