This is not quite good news for China's top smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi. According to reports and tweets of some who participated in the company's 8th flash sale in India last October 28, the usually "sold-out" Redmi 1S took minutes before it went out of stock, considering they have only released 60,000 of its units unlike the previous 90,000. This is indeed surprising and admittedly, a bit alarming for the Chinese tech giant as they have always taken pride of the fact that their devices have all been sold out in a matter of seconds during the past sales. Xiaomi went on with their promised 8th flash sale despite the warning given by Indian Air Force about the Redmi 1S sending unauthorized data to remote servers located in China.
The company's VP for International Operations Hugo Barra has addressed that concern saying the company has taken action by migrating all corresponding data and services of their Indian market users, from Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in Singapore and USA. "The migration process, which began earlier this year, will be completed by the end of October and will benefit users in international markets, including our customers in India, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan," Barra revealed.
Just like in the last flash sale, the package did not include a complimentary screen protector and micro SIM card adapter. But this could not be the reason for the not-so-great turnout of the 8th flash sale, could it? Some reports also indicated that the previous sale was not as phenomenal as the first few ones because the sale lasted more than a minute upon opening. According to the Jabong.com co-founder and now Xiaomi's Head of Operations in India, Manu Jain clarified that it's because of the "Diwali travel plans of customers." "We believe this was because of people traveling during the festive period. We do not believe that this is of any concern, as we continue to see overwhelming response from our fans, even for next week's sale," Jain remarked.
We will find out what's going to be the result of their 9th flash sale happening this November 4.
