Xiaomi has just announced an investment in Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, India’s largest digital media entertainment company. This is Xiaomi’s fist investment in India, and it leads the current round of investing with US$25M (Approx INR 170Cr). Other participants in the round include existing investors Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Indian billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.
Xiaomi with this investment in Hungama puts a major step forward in introducing localised internet Services. The move also solidifies Xiaomi’s commitment in India.
Xiaomi entered India in July 2014 and started local manufacturing a year later. Currently, over 75% of Xiaomi’s smartphones sold in India are made in India. With its current investment Xiaomi plans to start integrating Hungama’s content services into its platform, which will also include themes and ringtones.
Hugo Barra, Vice President, Xiaomi said
Xiaomi has been an Internet company from the very start. We think of smartphones as a platform for us to deliver Internet services, and this includes content. As our user base in India grows and as 4G penetration in India continues picking up, we will start to see more and more consumption of digital media through Xiaomi devices. We are investing in Hungama not only to start integrating content into our smartphones, but also to grow together with them and deepen our understanding of the content sector in India. We have carefully selected Hungama because of what they are doing in terms of aggregating large amounts of content and delivering an amazing user experience.
Hungama has partnered with over 700 content creators, and now has more than 8000 movies in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi and six other Indian regional languages in its catalogue. Moreover, the service has over 65 million monthly active users who listen to music, watch videos and movies on the Hungama Platform.
Neeraj Roy, Founder and CEO, Hungama added:
We are very excited to be partnering with Xiaomi, as we are extremely aligned in the way we see digital media becoming mainstream on mobile devices. Xiaomi has a very engaged community of fans, which we believe will benefit from the fabulous and immense repertoire from Hungama’s content services. With this investment, we intend to further strengthen our movie and TV services and in fact, Hungama Play will shortly add 1500 hours of TV content in Indian languages and English.
This is one key step by Xiaomi in building its ecosystem in India. They are replicating what they did in China years ago. They invested in 55 companies which together now form the Mi Ecosystem. There has been a huge demand for Xiaomi’s TV’s in India as well and every time the company says that there is not enough content with them to launch it in India. This is definitely a step towards getting more content onboard and also an assurance that “Xiaomi Is Here To Stay.”
