No letup in Indian craze for ‘Apple of China’: Xiaomi’s Redmi 1S sells out in 4.5s

On a day when the world waits with bated breath for Apple to launch the iPhone 6, there was no letup in the craze for Xiaomi in India. This afternoon the second lot of 40,000 Redmi 1s went up for sale online on Flipkart, and it lasted just 4.5 seconds. That’s just a fraction of a second more than it took to sell the first lot of 40,000 units on September 2.

There was the familiar outpouring of angst on social media from the tens of thousands of fans who registered for the sale and returned empty-handed, many vowing to buy an ASUS Zenfone on Amazon instead. But you can be sure that when registrations open this evening for the next Redmi sale, the usual numbers will queue up again. After all, the stampede kept up its tempo through six flash sales of the Mi 3, before Xiaomi decided to put that on hold for the time being to concentrate on the Redmi and build up stock. And Redmi has just done two rounds so far.

The point is that the value-for-money proposition Xiaomi brings to a market hungry for budget smartphones is irresistible. Just to put it in perspective, at INR 5999 (US$99), the Redmi 1S costs ten times less than the expected price of the cheapest variant of the iPhone 6 that will be unveiled later today.

See: With iPhone 6, Apple joins a queue to feed craze for large-screen smartphones in India

Xiaomi is often dubbed the ‘Apple of China’ – and some even say uncharitably that it does the best job among phone-makers who copy Apple – but it actually runs on a very different model, selling its phones at nearly cost price.

“We are not looking to make profits out of selling our phones. Our phones are just the starting point. We will make our money in the long run from an ecosystem around our devices. Like Amazon who built Kindle, Fire Phone, and invested in technology to boost its core ecommerce. Similarly, our phones are just a means to an end, and not the end,” Xiaomi vice-president Hugo Barra explained to Tech in Asia during the launch of Redmi 1S in Bangalore. In fact, Xiaomi thinks of itself as an ecommerce company like Amazon, and not the high-flying Apple of Cupertino, California.

See: Why Xiaomi faces a catch-22 situation in India, and what it is doing about it