Xiaomi's website overloaded by Brazilian buyers on first day of launch

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi's online store in Brazil was overloaded on Tuesday due to the large amount of buyers, the first day its products were put on sale here.

Xiaomi's star model "Redmi 2" was officially put on sale for the Brazilian market on its online store at 12:00 a.m. local time Tuesday.

The first batch of smartphones were only for consumers with reservations, but the number of buyers trying to visit the website increased so fast that the online store was immediately overloaded. It returned to normal one and half an hour later.

Hugo Barra, vice president of Xiaomi international, said that the onslaught of consumers was only natural, adding that in September 2014, Indians bought all the 40,000 "Redmi 1s" smartphones in 4.2 seconds.

However, the experience was unpleasant for locals who were not familiar with Xiaomi's way of selling. Some complained on Facebook about how difficult it was to obtain a Xiaomi phone.

"I kept refreshing the webpage for two hours, but still didn't get it. Xiaomi should have given us a heads-up on its way of selling things," said Carlos Sassi. "But I will still buy it. It's cheap with good quality."

Brazil is Xiaomi's first market outside Asia and the cheapest Redmi 2 model is only 499 reais (162 U.S. dollars).

Xiaomi, created in 2010, is currently the fifth major smartphone maker in the world. Its MIUI operational system has 100 million subscribers.

The company has a market value of around 45 billion dollars. It sold 61 million mobile devices last year. Endi