It was just yesterday when we brought you word that Xiaomi has been investigated by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) for a possible misleading of consumers due to the numbers of smartphones sold in a short matter of time. This has been termed to be “hunger marketing”, which is to create an impression that the particular device could be in short supply, and hence might just cause folks to hurry up and make a purchase on the spot. Well, the Taiwan FTC has issued a $20,000 fine on Xiaomi for doing so.
Xiaomi has quite an interesting sense of humor however, having introduced a rather cheeky apology via a poster that depicts a cute looking child over on its official Weibo account, which you can see on your right. In the apology, they were sorry to the Taiwanese authorities for not selling the exact number of units as advertised, which if looked from another angle, would still show the world that they have sold quite a large number of handsets in the first place. What do you think of Xiaomi’s sales tactics so far, which more often than not involves selling smartphones in batches, so that an opportunity might arise to make news out of how fast it “sold out”?
Apparently, Xiaomi sold “only” 9,339 devices in the first flash sale, moving 9,492 units in the second sale, and 7,389 in the third, instead of the 30,000 quoted.2
