The supply chain disruptions occurred during the global pandemic has indeed affected the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. Thus, the company has now hired two new smartphone manufacturing partners, BYD and DBG in India to develop factories in the country, and further pushing its "Make in India" drive to the next level.
Manu Kumar Jain, Managing Director, Xiaomi India says, “The DBG manufacturing facility is already operational in Haryana and the BYD facility in Tamil Nadu will be completed within the first half of this year.”
Xiaomi already has three manufacturing plants in India in partnership with Foxconn and Flex spread across Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.
Manu further adds, "With these two new smartphone manufacturing partners, we now have presence across northern and southern parts of the country. With the DBG factory going live we expect our production capacity to increase by about 20 per cent within this quarter. This factory went live two months ago. The BYD factory should be operational within the first half of this year and we expect the capacity to further increase.”
The Xiaomi India MD said that the new manufacturing facilities will help the biggest smartphone seller in the country to meet the "massive demand" and help the company stay protected in case of any future supply chain disruptions in situations like a pandemic or other such events.
"If you add all of this together then approximately 75 percent of the phone is already covered from a value perspective," he said, adding that the company is also working with partners to manufacture the camera panel locally in India.
"Total number of people working in our smartphone factories as part of the Xiaomi family has gone up to 30,000. We are now locally manufacturing 100 percent our TVs sold in India.”
In addition to these two new smartphone manufacturing partners, Xiaomi also added one new TV manufacturing partner Radiant which is based in Telangana.
Xiaomi has also initiated TV manufacturing in India in partnership with Dixon Technologies about two years ago.