By: Aswathy Nair
Smartphone major Xiaomi will make a foray into the Indian PC market with the addition of Mi laptops to its India product portfolio next month, a senior company official said on Thursday.
The development comes at a time when the industry expects a greater demand for laptops as an increasing number of people are working and studying from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking with PTI, Xiaomi India Chief Business Officer Raghu Reddy said the company”s research showed that the PC category in India is still under penetrated.
“Also, brands have 20-50 SKUs (models), which can confuse the buyer about which device to go for,” he said.
Reddy said Xiaomi will have limited number of SKUs (stock keeping units) and target a large group of customers with the Mi range of laptops that will be launched “some time in June”.
The devices will be targeted at power users, he said but declined to comment on the pricing of the devices.
Earlier this year, Xiaomi said it will bring more products under its ”Mi” brand as it looks to offer more premium experiences to customers.
According to research firm IDC, the traditional PC market in India declined by 16.7 per cent year-on-year at 1.8 million units in the March 2020 quarter. Within this, the notebooks category recorded a 16.8 per cent decline due to significant y-o-y contractions in the consumer and education segments.
Notebooks in the gaming and thin-and-light segments have been witnessing strong growth in the past few quarters in the country.
HP retained the top position in the overall PC market (desktops and notebooks) with a share of 28.2 per cent in the January-March 2020 quarter, followed by Dell Technologies (25.9 per cent) and Lenovo (20 per cent).
Taiwanese tech major ASUS has said it has been able to recover over 90 per cent of sales levels of the pre-lockdown period after resuming operations and expressed confidence in cornering 23-25 per cent share of the consumer PC market in India by the end of the year.
Arnold Su, business head of consumer gaming PC (system business group) at ASUS India, has said the company sees a pent-up demand in the market for computing devices as people look for PCs continue working and studying from home amid the pandemic.
He added that the pick-up in sales has been “phenomenal” after the lockdown was relaxed and the company expects sales to surpass average sales in the coming weeks.
