Giving a fillip to Make in India, Xiaomi has added two new smartphone production facilities and one smart TV plant to its cluster in the country, Manu Kumar Jain, Managing Director, India, and Global Vice-President, announced at a virtual press conference on Thursday.

He said, with this, 99 percent of smartphones sold in India and 100 percent of TVs would be manufactured locally. "We hope to play a small role in building India as a global manufacturing hub," said Jain.

One of the smartphone factories, built in partnership with DBG India, is already operational in Haryana, increasing the manufacturing capacity by 20 percent. The second new facility will be set up with Chinese electronics manufacturer BYD in Tamil Nadu and is expected to start operations by the first half of 2021.

The new TV manufacturing plant is being set up in Telangana by Radiant Technology, a Hyderabad-based television manufacturer.

Xiaomi has two other mobile manufacturing plants in Tamil Nadu and TV manufacturing unit in Andhra Pradesh's Tirupati, run by Dixon Technologies.

As far as Mi TVs are concerned, more than 30 lakh sets have been sold in India to date. The objective of these additional facilities is to meet domestic demand. In early 2020, Xiaomi even started exporting smartphones to neighbouring countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh, but that had to be stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Next week, it will launch Redmi Note 10 series of budget smartphones.

Xiaomi is now the third-largest e-commerce platform in India after Amazon and Flipkart with a 27 percent smartphone market share in the quarter ending December 2020.

Jain said the company has added 10,000 people to its workforce — including those who are directly under Xiaomi’s payroll and those employed by its partners — in 2020 alone, taking the staff strength in India to 60,000.

"In 2020, when organisations were downsizing their workforce, we were focused on putting together the building blocks for our growth in the Indian market – our employees. We generated employment for over 10,000 individuals in 2020," Jain said.

First Published:Feb 25, 2021 6:13 PM IST