The Indian market has been a bloom-in for the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi.
The Chinese giant has consistently topped the charts and maintained its position as the most demanded and purchased smartphone vendor in India.
Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, Xiaomi held the market leader position, shipping a total of 1.3 crore units in Q3, showing an annual growth of 9%.
However, lately there have been several complaints against the Chinese market leader, of customers receiving fake Xiaomi Mi smartphones, along with counterfeit Xiaomi products.
This leads to our central story here that the company has announced busting 7 suppliers in Chennai and Bangalore for selling counterfeit Xiaomi products and have seized such products worth upto Rs 33.3 lakhs.
Counterfeit Xiaomi Products Discovered and Seized
After receiving several complaints from its customers about receiving fake Xiaomi phones and products, the Chinese smartphone maker initiated a major raid and discovered the focal hub involved in producing and selling counterfeit Xiaomi products.
The company has announced that the local police of Chennai and Bengaluru busted four suppliers in Chennai and three in Bengaluru during October and November and seized fake Xiaomi products from them, worth Rs 33.3 lakhs.
This was done after Xiaomi filed a complaint under its ‘comprehensive proactive anti-counterfeit program’.
What all Fake Xiaomi Products were Being Sold?
The whole nexus involved in the counterfeiting of products involved local shop owners and suppliers in Bangalore and Chennai.
They were in this business of selling counterfeit products of Xiaomi and possibly other smartphone brands too to multiple locations, for a long time.
Xiaomi has revealed that more than 3000 Xiaomi counterfeit products have been seized, which include headphones, power banks, chargers, earphones and mobile back cases.
Fake Mi products worth Rs 24.9 lakhs and 8.4 lakhs have been sold by these vendors.
How to Spot a Fake Xiaomi Product?
While the nexus of counterfeit Xiaomi products have been busted, it can be assumed that a fraction of such products have already been distributed across different parts of the country.
This just adds on to a layer of security on your (customer) end. While it is difficult to differentiate between an original Xiaomi product from a counterfeit one, these few points could help you.
If you are purchasing a product, like Mi Powerbank or any of Xiaomi’s audio products, it will carry a security code, which you can check on mi.com. This will help you verify the authenticity of the product.
Secondly, the packaging of original and counterfeit products have quality differences. For this, you can again visit any Mi Store to help check the original packaging.
You can also check for the original Mi India Logo on the product, which could further add on to the originality of the same.
Products like fitness bands will have pre-installed Mi Fit app compatibility.
Thanked by: Mr.Love, the_prince
