MENS, MILK and Xiaomi
In his book on the Chinese smartphone company, Xiaomi , Jayadevan PK says the startup started to plan to expand into India in 2013. It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2013, India’s transition to smartphones was still slow. India was a MENS club – no, not the sexist one, MENS here stood for phones from Motorola, Ericson, Nokia and Samsung. Along with those companies, like in China, home-grown companies had started to make cheap smartphones – they were the MILK, an acronym for Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn. The timing of Xiaomi’s entry into India in 2014 was lucky – it coincided with a steep fall in Internet prices, brutal data plan wars among telecom providers, and Reliance Jio forcing data prices to absolute rock bottom. The “great Indian smartphone migration” had begun. But first, Xiaomi had a few changes to make. The name, to start with. People outside China didn’t know how to pronounce it! It meant “millet” and alluded to the Communist Party’s use of the “mill...