Chinese smartphone manufacturer sells 150,000 devices through WeChat

Chinese smartphone manufacturer, Xiaomi, sold 150,000 devices in 9 minutes and 55 seconds through messaging app, WeChat.

Xiaomi, China’s fifth most popular smartphone brand has gained popularity over the last few years in China, and has established a large fan base for their high-spec Android powered devices at relatively low prices. Xiaomi’s sales model consists of selling batches of phones, with flash sales announced shortly before they happen.

This last Thursday, Xiaomi announced a flash sale of their recently announced flagship device, the Mi-3, for the price of $327 per phone. The sale itself differed from previous flash sales as it took place solely on China’s popular text messaging service WeChat. All aspects of the transaction, from reserving the phone to paying for it, took place on the mobile application.

WeChat is China’s most popular messaging application, with 272 million active monthly users, and over 500 million registered accounts. The application’s popularity has proved to be a threat to China’s payment giant Alibaba, and their payment method Alipay. Alibaba recently announced their rival messaging application Laiwang, after the media published WeChat’s numbers.

Xiaomi has shown more impressive sales recently. Last month, the first batch of Mi-3 smartphones was made available on Xiaomi’s website, where they sold 100,000 devices in a record 86 seconds. Although not selling as fast as the previous flash sale, the WeChat only sale was impressive nonetheless, given it was made available only to people who use the application and are willing to use their smartphone to place a transaction.

Mobile transactions are growing, and recently accounted for 24.2% of Black Friday Ecommerce sales. China has other similar applications that combine text-messaging with payments, and its world breaking sales days show China’s affection for Ecommerce sales, both online and mobile.