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Xiaomi Corp has done it again - but this time even faster.
All 100,000 units of its latest flagship smartphone, the Mi-3, sold out in 86 seconds.
Beijing-based Xiaomi, which recently hired Google Inc's former vice-president Hugo Barra, announced its third-generation Android mobile device last month. The company said the Mi-3 is the world's first smartphone running on Nvidia's Tegra 4 quad-core chipset and has superb functionality.
But thousands of potential customers were left disappointed as they sat in front of their computer screens ready to place an order as soon as business opened on Tuesday.
The 16-gigabyte version of the Mi-3 sells for 1,999 yuan ($323.96). Xiaomi opened online sales of the handsets at 12 noon and announced all had been bought in less than a minute-and-a-half.
Zhou Dandan, a white-collar worker in Beijing, said she logged on to the Xiaomi website 10 minutes before sales started. It took her two to three minutes to successfully log on the official site because the system was slow, presumably because thousands were also trying to log on, keen to get their hands on the keenly priced device.
On the stroke of 12, she pressed the buy button but the website just showed a countdown image. At 12:08 pm, it informed her that her purchase attempt was unsuccessful.
"I phoned officials from Xiaomi, asking them whether I can manage to get a handset. But they said even Xiaomi staff have to purchase handsets online and strictly adhere to the 'first come, first serve' rule," Zhou said.
Although Xiaomi will offer a second round of sales next Tuesday, Zhou said she is pessimistic about getting a handset online and expects to wait a few months to buy one from a telecom carrier offline outlet - by which time an even newer model may be available.
Mark Hughes, a foreign journalist who lies in Beijing, said he had heard a lot about the Xiaomi smartphone and had a strong interest in getting an Mi-3 handset.
"The latest device seems to be extremely good, according to reports - and cheap compared with the iPhone and other smartphones. Also previous successful Xiaomi smartphone models led customers to believe the Mi-3 would not disappoint," he said.
Hughes shares the views of a group of people who believe Xiaomi is manipulating the market - a similar tactic said to be used by US-based giant Apple Inc. "They build up anticipation, keep the shipping numbers secret and stir up customers' interest," he said. "It's an old trick, playing on people's psychology. It gets the device talked about and people get obsessive. Rumors circulate and its quality gets talked up and up."
Xiaomi denied it was deploying so-called "hunger marketing". Liu Wei, a spokesman for Xiaomi, said the company does its best to satisfy people's demand but its production capacity cannot keep up with demand.
"Because of the imbalance between demand and supply, it is easy for people to be under the illusion that we are deliberately creating a show," Liu said.
Mobile phone scalpers, who developed the art of selling Apple's iPhones at prices higher than the official figure after buying them in bulk, sometimes overseas if they had already gone on sale there, are now sensing a new business opportunity with Xiaomi smartphones. In Beijing's Zhongguancun area, famed for its high-tech wares, scalpers are asking for an additional 500 yuan on average for every Mi-3 device they sell.
Xiaomi's competitively priced phones are highly sought after. Every batch that is released regularly sells out fast, often within 30 minutes. At the end of July, when Xiaomi announced its most affordable smartphone yet, it attracted more than 7 million reservations and sold out its first batch of 100,000 units in just 90 seconds.
shenjingting@chinadaily.com.cn
