Xiaomi Mi 3 not discontinued, but no clarity on when it returns

After the most recent Xiaomi Mi 3 flash sale on August 26, the company didn’t disclose details about the next sale, something it has been doing for the past five weeks. Instead, the company announced to put up the Redmi 1s on sale the next Tuesday and has already received over 1,00,000 registrations. It was highly speculated that the company has **discontinued the Mi 3** as the Mi 4 launch looms ahead. Refuting all the reports and speculation, Xiaomi’s Manu Jain now clarifies that the Mi 3 isn’t discontinued. However, he refuses to give a time frame when the device will be back in stock.   “For the next few weeks, we will be focusing on the Redmi 1S, but we have not discontinued the Mi 3 in India. I can’t give an exact timeline because we don’t have any data on the Redmi 1S right now, but we are certainly not discontinuing the Mi 3 right now,” Manu Jain, head of Xiaomi India told NDTV Gadgets.   “We had not expected the kind of demand we got at all,” he said. “Both the Mi 3 and the powerbank have been selling out completely. The powerbank, we believed, experts told us, the market was around 30,000 to 40,000 units per month. The demand has completely outstripped that,” he further added.   There has been huge **demand for the Xiaomi Mi 3**   and the device has been put up in batches of limited units every week because it has to be customised for the Indian market. As ever country comes with its own rules and regulations, units from China cannot be directly sold in India.   With the Mi 3 too, the demand has hugely outstripped the supply, which is the only reason, Jain insisted, that the company does not have any units available at the moment. However that does not mean they can simply pick up extra units from other markets and bring them to India, he clarified. While the 40,000 units of the Redmi will go up on sale this Tuesday, and we could also expect a new more batches in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the company may stock the Mi 3 units too, depending upon the market data it gathered.   Given the price difference between, the Mi 3 eating into Redmi 1s sales  seems quite unlikely. In all likelihood, the Redmi 1S will draw a lot more people to the site. To put it in perspective, the Redmi 1s at Rs 5,999 has specs  **better than the Moto G** , but is priced  **lower than the Moto E** .