Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc. said that it will open a facility in Taiwan in the next few months to showcase its products and provide better after-care service.
Xiaomi, whose low-cost, feature-rich phones are sold largely online, previously planned to set up a store in Taiwan by the end of 2014, but the timetable was postponed because the company needed more time to find an appropriate location, said Bin Lin, Xiaomi’s co-founder and president.
The new store, with over 2,500 square feet of floor space, will be close to the Xingtian Temple station on the Taipei Metro. The temple is the most-visited one in northern Taiwan. The store is likely to open between April and July to showcase Xiaomi devices but will not sell them, he said.
“I think we should improve our services (in Taiwan) and learn more from Taiwanese businesses,” Lin told a spring banquet with Taiwanese media.
Also, the Chinese handset maker is scheduled to open two authorized maintenance stores with local partners in May in New Taipei’s Banqiao and Taichung in central Taiwan, Lin added.
Xiaomi has 18 “experience” stores in China and plans to open one in Hong Kong later this year. The company’s India head said Thursday that it would set up 100 of the stores in India in 2015 from the first week of April, each of which will cover 500 to 1,000 square feet.
Founded in 2010, Xiaomi is known as “China’s Apple,” partially because of the perceived similarities between some of its devices and iPhones, according to BBC News.
Valued at around US$46 billion, the fast-growing start-up expects to sell 80 million to 100 million smartphones in 2015 after hitting the 61 million mark last year.