In half a day, Xiaomi unloads $163 million worth of handsets

November 11th, or 11/11, is called Singles' Day in China where it is celebrated as a holiday. To be more precise, it is a shopping holiday in the country. Taking advantage of what has been described as "Black Friday on steroids," handset manufacturer Xiaomi announced that it has sold 720,000 phones in 12 hours today.

Former Google executive Hugo Barra, now a Xiaomi VP, posted on his Google+ page that those 720,000 phones represented sales of $163 million for the manufacturer. Last year, the company sold $90 million worth of handsets for the entire day. Xiaomi has nearly doubled that total, and still has a half a day remaining.

Xiaomi has managed to sell 250,000 units of its flagship Xiaomi Mi 4, which is priced at $300 USD. 460,000 Xiaomi Redmi 1S handsets, priced at $150 USD, have also been snapped up. And while $163 million in sales over a 12-hour period is nothing to sneeze at, online retailer Alibaba raked in $2 billion worth of sales during the first two hours of Singles' Day today.


source: +HugoBarra via TechCrunch