Xiaomi gearing bunch of premium Mi flagship phones for India, there’s hope for laptops too

After a near three-year long hiatus, Xiaomi is finally rey to bring its Mi-branded premium flagship phones to India this year. last Mi-branded premium flagship to launch in India was rar unconventional Mi Mix 2 (2017), while last conventional product under branding was Mi 5 (2016). t that it’s a surprise or anything. Xiaomi has been teasing Mi te 10 India launch for some time w, so we knew that’s coming. What’s news is, Mi te 10 won’t just be a one-off thing from Xiaomi. 

Xiaomi is sort of revamping whole Mi brand for India in 2020. This obviously means that we can expect more smart TVs and IoT devices from company this year – and hopefully, new categories. But while Mi-branded smart TVs and IoT devices have been around for some time w – and doing well, to say least – it’s return of Mi-branded premium flagship phone that is particularly interesting.  

In order to understand this, you’ll have to go back in history, which considering we’re dealing with Xiaomi here, isn’t too long ago. Mi 5 was Xiaomi’s last ‘proper’ Mi flagship phone to launch in India. It did t do very well due to several reasons -  

• Mi 5 was 3G-only when 4G was just around corner 
• Xiaomi, for some reason, decided to bring an underclocked variant to India
• its price was on higher side, by Xiaomi standards at that time 

failure of Mi 5 forced Xiaomi to rethink its whole India strategy vis-a-vis flagship phones. Mi 6 was first casualty. But n Xiaomi India pulled a total anti-Xiaomi by launching Mi Mix 2 in country. While way ahe of its time, Mi Mix 2 was also a niche product – at a time when Xiaomi was launching every product here with sole purpose of becoming a hit, in or words, drive volumes. Mi Mix 2 was last of its kind product in India. 

Mi 2.0  

“When we say that we’re going to focus on Mi lineup, we mean, we would want to bring devices that help us drive volumes in categories that we’re present in,” Raghu Reddy, who hes Xiaomi India’s categories tells me. 

Strangely, he’s also showing off Mi Mix Alpha to select media in National Capital. While Xiaomi is still ‘evaluating’ wher or t to bring this 'concept' phone to India, one can’t help but tice, it's also a very niche product. Like Mi Mix 2 was, once upon a time. Raghu clears air. “You’ll definitely see more action (from us) in devices that are relatively more accessible than concepts like Mi Mix Alpha. We’re looking at a bunch of premium flagship phones.” 

In essence, while Xiaomi isn’t shy of showing off – or even launching – a product like Mi Mix Alpha, company is in a much better shape w to do that, and, also bring in a slew of or devices to India that will, in fact, make ‘actual’ money for it. 

“I think a lot of times in past, due to lack of resources, we couldn’t do everything. But we’ve come a long way. We’ve been running a very stable business on Redmi side over last couple of years, and re is confidence. We’ve also beefed up our entire team and bandwidth across multiple points to ensure teams can do justice (to ir roles). re’s also bandwidth that’s free to do some of or stuff,” Raghu explains. 

Premium is keyword here 

‘Premium’ Mi flagships are coming which means re’s hope for phones like Mi 8 and Mi 9 – or Mi 10? - to launch in India. te special emphasis on word premium. Because premium does t mean only high-end specs and slick design in Xiaomi-verse. It also means, se phones may t show s, unlike some of new- Redmi phones (excluding Redmi K20/Redmi K20 Pro).     

You can say that India was caught unaware when Xiaomi started serving s in MIUI one fine day two years ago, out of blue – with prior intimation. To this day, Xiaomi continues to serve s in MIUI, in India. move has – for obvious reasons - t gone down well with users. Although re’s option to limit s in MIUI, re’s full-proof mechanism to stop m altoger. t to mention, limiting m by selective tweaks in UI isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. 

“If we are calling it a premium flagship, we would want to give a premium customer experience as well. We’ll try to here to what customers like. I can’t talk about specific products but if it’s a premium smartphone and we’re calling it a premium smartphone, and you’ve heard what we’ve done with K20 and K20 Pro, re’s reason why we would go against wishes of our customers,” Raghu says. Your guess is as good as mine here, but I believe he’s hinting s, at least, in ‘premium’ phones.  

next big thing 

Smartphones won’t be only category that will see a revamp this year. More Mi-branded products are coming to India. A fan favorite has been laptops. Xiaomi has alrey registered ‘RedmiBook’ tremark with Intellectual Property India hinting at an imminent launch. But remember, Xiaomi has never come out and said that it’s planning to bring laptops to India – Redmi or orwise.  

“re were three different occasions when Xiaomi India h pitched for bringing smart TVs to India. It got shot down due to multiple reasons. biggest reason has always been our focus on doing one thing correctly, getting a handle over it, learning from our mistakes, being stey and n moving on to next (step). Our phone business stabilised in a big way in 2016-17 and post that we took call to get to TVs. w that our TV business has stabilised, we have confidence to move to next big thing,” Raghu says. 

But what is that next big thing, I ask. 

“If Manu were to put any post, which product we should bring to India (before TV launch), it was always TVs first, followed by laptops. Post that, it has been laptops, but since time we launched Mi Watch, people have been wanting us to bring that to India.” 

Mi Watch is exclusive to China for w and is apparently t ey for India or any of global markets. But what about laptops? 

“We do kw that laptops are up re as most requested product in list, and we’re aware of that. We would be stupid t to be listening to that,” Raghu quips. Again, your guess is as good as mine, but I believe, re’s hope.  

Xiaomi me its India debut in 2014 as an online-only brand with only four team members including company’s (w) India he, Manu Kumar Jain. Five years hence, Xiaomi can boast of 50,000+ team members across offices, manufacturing plants, service centers and Mi stores. Clearly, Xiaomi has come a long way. A lot of its success can be attributed to its focus, which is “to create high quality products and offer m at prices that allowed us to bring our invation to everyone.” So far, Xiaomi hasn’t budged from that goal, r does it intend to. Mi was how it really began. It was only about time that it got its due.  

(Im credit: Saurabh Singh)

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