BEIJING - Chinese tech firm Xiaomi's founder and chief executive Lei Jun has revealed in an open letter that it has sold one million smartphones in the first 18 days of this month in India.
The first 50,0000 were sold between Oct 1 and 3 during the country's festive season, according to a report dated Oct 5 on tech-blog website Mashable Asia.
Xiaomi sold about 2.3 million smartphones in India during the first two quarters combined this year, according to the report.
Li Lei, a Xiaomi employee, shared on WeChat that it took five months for China's once top smartphone vendor to sell its first one million units in India when it first tapped on the new territory.
Mr Lei expressed special thanks in his bilingual open letter to FlipKart, Amazon and Snapdeal, its channel partners in India, through which he would like to repeat Xiaomi's overwhelming success in China.
The company set a Guinness record of sales of 2.11 million smartphones in 12 hours on April 8, 2015.
Mr Lei has revealed that Xiaomi aimed to achieve the largest market share in India within three to five years but has not disclosed any sales target.
Market research firm IDC's data released on Sept 2 showed that in the second quarter of this year, Samsung led with a 28.5 per cent market share in the top 30 cities of India.
It was followed by Micromax with 11.9 per cent and Xiaomi with 8.1 per cent.
Xiaomi has ascended to 8.4 per cent in September, Mr Lei highlighted in his letter, also citing IDC data.
However, in the whole Indian market, which saw a total shipment of 275 million units in the second quarter, Xiaomi had not broken into the top five.
Samsung took the largest share with 25.1 per cent, followed by Micromax with 12.9 per cent and Lenovo Group with 7.7 per cent, according to IDC.
In April this year, Xiaomi invested US$25 million (S$35 million) in India's Hungama Digital Media Entertainment.
The latter boasts more than 8,000 movies in Hindi and other Indian regional languages on its platform and over 65 million monthly active users of its music, videos and movies.
