Xiaomi is seeing a slump in sales in its home market of China. The brand has lost a lot of ground to homegrown rivals and now it is no longer in even the top 5 brands in the Chinese market. This is a huge slide for a brand that was once hailed as the Apple of China. A company who’s public profile was boosted to no end when respected Google exec Hugo Barra quit his job at the search giant and moved to China to take the helm of this Chinese dragon. All those heady days seem to be well and truly behind us now that the Xiaomi’s Chinese market share is diminishing rapidly and even Hugo Barra recently announced that he was quitting his job at Xiaomi to go back home to the US.

India is Xiaomi’s saving grace

If there’s a bright spot in Xiaomi’s future in 2017, it is India. India is turning out to be the fastest growing market for smartphones in the world and most of that demand is for phones that are priced in the low to medium end of the of the spectrum. This is where Xiaomi’s phones shine and it is no wonder that brand is doing better than ever in India, more so than anywhere else in the world.

The brand new Redmi Note 4 is the perfect example of this. The Note belongs to Xiaomi’s low to mid end Redmi brand of phones and is manufactured in India itself, which is one of the many reasons that allows Xiaomi to price their phones super competitively and undercut rivals by a huge margin. The brand new Note 4 went on sale online in India and within just ten minutes of it being available to buy, the Indian public snapped up more than two hundred and fifty thousand Note 4’s, if Xiaomi’s numbers are to be believed.

This isn’t too hard to believe either because there was a huge amount of buzz surrounding the launch of the phone and anticipation for it was high, ever since Xiaomi launched the phone at the CES expo in Las Vegas USA, a few weeks earlier. Case makers had their designer and custom Redmi Note 4 cases ready to buy online, days before the official launch of the phone in India. Xiaomi’s phones have always been well supported by the makers of phone cases and covers in India, thanks to their popularity and the Note 4 was no different, with buyers able to create a custom Redmi Note 4 case for themselves before they even bought the phone.