Mobile retailers’ campaign ‘slanderous’: Xiaomi | Economic Times

India’s top Chinese mobile retailer Xiaomi has hit out at the domestic retailers’ body, AIMRA, calling the latter’s allegations of online bias as an “attempt to defame Mi India and its employees'' and said the association’s recent campaign against Chinese smartphone maker was “slanderous” and “libellous.”Sunil Baby, senior director of offline sales at India’s top smartphone maker, in a recent letter to the All India Mobile Retailers Association (AMIRA), said the company is anguished at the ‘tonality’ and content of its recent emails and social media communication.Mobile retailers in India, through AIMRA, have threatened to approach the Competition Commission of India (CCI) as well as the courts against Xiaomi, accusing the smartphone brand of violating the terms of agreement by exclusively tying up with online marketplaces for phone launches.Baby said that Xiaomi is deeply hurt by this “slanderous and libellous campaign” by the association despite its “wholehearted attempts” to support our retail partners.“We recently noticed some of the AIMRA functionaries circulating whatsapp messages showing Mi India in a poor way and spreading factually incorrect statements about the brand...we hope that our relationship should not be strained by unwanted personal attacks and factually incorrect statements being made or by misrepresenting information,” Baby said.AIMRA has claimed that the agreement between Xiaomi India and offline retailers signed a few years back has been repeatedly violated, which has resulted in the non-availability of stocks to most small businesses.“Xiaomi’s claims of the highest sales in the last two months has put us all in contemplation as to from which channel has such huge sales been achieved. Whether it is done by exporters, aggregators or some other channel because Mi partners across India have got the least stock or no stock during that period,” AIMRA had said in its letter to Baby last week, which was followed by various posts on micro-blogging site Twitter accusing Xiaomi of favouring the online channel.In the rebuttal, Xiaomi clarified that all its devices across Mi and Redmi are available to its 20,000+ retail partners, with no exclusivity to any online platform.