Xiaomi to tie-up with Indian developers for country specific applications

Will also open 100 stores in India this year to help consumers

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc is scouting for partnerships with Indian start-ups and application developers to build country specific services and application, which can be integrated into upcoming phones from its stable. The interface of these services will be more than just pre-loaded apps and is a precursor to more customisation for India, said officials of the company on Thursday.

Xiaomi launched the successor to Redmi 1S, priced at Rs. 6,999 and tablet MiPad on Thursday which will be sold through Flipkart from March 24.

Meanwhile, the company also said that it will open 100 stores in India this year to help consumers in the world's third-largest smartphone market "experience" the company's devices. However, its devices will continue to be sold through e-commerce sites and will not be 'for sale' at these stores.

The 'service and experience stores' would be set up over 500 to 1,000 square feet and will launch in cities including Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore in the first week of April, Manu Jain, Xiaomi's India head, said.

The company has a partnership with Bharti Airtel to sell its Redmi Note 4G handsets through Airtel's outlets. But, Jain said that the company is not looking at expanding the arrangement with other offline partners, for now.

Jai Mani, Xiaomi's India Product Lead said that these could be TrueCaller kind of apps or services which help you order food from restuarants or be updated on your data usage. However, the interface of these services will be better than that being offered currently by the applications in this space.

Owing to concerns about data security on its network, Xiaomi is also looking at hosting data from Indian users in data centres based in the country. It has already migrated its international users to data centres in Singapore and the US through a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the India centre could be operational by June this year.

"We had an infrastructure team coming in from China and they are talking to various people here. By June, we should have a data centre in place here," Barra said.

As far as its manufacturing plans are concerned, Xiaomi is also exploring options of contract manufacturing here, though that is still "12-18 months away", Barra said.

The Redmi 2, introduced on Thursday, features a 4.7-inch display, has a 1GB RAM, a 8MP rear and 2MP front cameras and 8GB memory (expandable up to 32GB). "We will put about 30,000-40,000 devices for sale in the first round on March 24. We will also bring in a limited version of Redmi 2 soon featuring 2GB RAM and 16GB memory, but that will take some time," Barra said.

The company also announced that it will bring its MiPad, which competes with Apple's Mini, to the Indian market for Rs 12,999.

With inputs from Reuters and PTI