According to the latest report, the Chinese company Xiaomi is trying its hands onto a retail model that involves selling of “refurbished and unboxed” units in India.
Manu Jain, who heads Xiaomi’s India operations, told BGR India “At times we get devices that are perfectly fine and have no problem, but they are opened boxes. This is a pilot we are doing in India to see if such a model can work.” India is not the first market where Xiaomi has implemented this model. Being in a pilot stage, the company has released very few quantities of the Redmi 1S to the companies it has partnered.
At the moment, there are two kinds of units that will go on sale. The first is unboxed, priced at Rs 4,999 on Overcart, which are perfectly good units, but the boxes have been opened. The other units are refurbished, which had some faults that have been fixed. A brand new Redmi 1S costs Rs 5,999 on Flipkart.
For the pilot, Xiaomi’s retail partners would refurbish the smartphone using genuine Xiaomi spare parts. However, if the model works, Xiaomi could have an authorized partner for refurbishing smartphones.
Xiaomi has seen impressive response from consumers in India and the company even hit the milestone of selling 1 million smartphones last year. The famous ‘flash sale’ model kicked off by Xiaomi and Flipkart has also received a significant response.
