Xiaomi and Flipkart said they sold their entire stock of Mi3 high-end phone in 38 minutes and 50 seconds today.
Registrations to purchase the device were open till July 21st and saw over 100,000 fans registered to buy the Mi 3, Flipkart said.
It is not clear how many Xiaomi Mi3 smartphones were on sale.
According to reports, many people who tried to buy the phone could not do so due to technical issues. Flipkart, the website, was briefly unreachable to fans, reminding Indians of their ordeals to buy train tickets from IRCTC website.
Commenting on the sales, Manu Jain, India Operations Head, Xiaomi, said, “We are pleasantly surprised and delighted with the overwhelming response we have received from our India fans. We would like to apologize to our fans who couldn’t purchase the Mi 3 today. We are responding immediately to the commitment shown to us by our customers by focussing on the following – we are working with Flipkart to ensure the experience of purchase is improved further and technical issues are resolved. We know some of our fans must be disappointed. We want to make it up to them.
“Hence for the next sale on July 29th only, we will ensure that customers who missed out on today’s sale are automatically registered to buy a Mi 3 on 29th. We underestimated the demand we would receive and we are taking steps to ramp up the supply as soon as possible. That being said we are committed that over the next few months, every fan in India will get to own a Mi device”
The trend is similar to what Xiaomi, known as the Apple of China, experiences in its home market, where it sells thousands of phones in a matter of seconds and minutes.
Recently the launch of Xiaomi’s Redmi Note in Singapore saw 5,000 phones sold within 42 seconds.
Michael Adnani, VP-Retail and Head- Brand Alliances, Flipkart said, “It is very encouraging to see the scale of response towards Xiaomi Mi3 that is exclusively available on Flipkart. We were confident of the success of Mi3 in India. It has done extremely well internationally and we naturally wanted to be able to bring this world-class device to our customers in India. We are working with Xiaomi to ensure that the purchase experience lives up to our Flipkart promise of excellence.”