Open the repair center before you scale

On 28 February 2026 Xiaomi opened the Xiaomi Service Center Akihabara. It repairs phones, tablets and wearables, with specially trained staff, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Wednesdays. The ground floor displays and sells products, and the basement is a "smart living" showroom. At that point Xiaomi had five stores in Japan: three in Saitama, one in Chiba, one inside Tokyo's 23 wards.

Five stores, then one repair center. A month later it opened four Kansai stores at once, and four months after that, Nagoya. So the order went like this. Once the stores reached a certain number, Xiaomi added repair first and expanded after.

The question Japanese customers ask before buying

Sell anything in Japan, a car, an appliance or software, and the customer will almost certainly ask one thing before ordering. What happens when something goes wrong? They don't mean the warranty. They mean who fixes it, where, and how long it takes. The question carries far more weight here than in China, and the reason is simple. Japanese consumers replace things slowly. Ten years for a rice cooker is normal, so before buying they are already thinking about whom to call in year seven.

For a foreign brand with an online shop and a few stores, the default answer is "send it back". Where to, and for how long, the customer doesn't know. And a customer who doesn't know doesn't buy. The Akihabara center changed the answer from "send it back" to "Akihabara, ten to seven".

Change the category and the question gets heavier

Toyo Keizai's view is that Xiaomi in Japan is turning from a phone maker into a lifestyle-appliance brand: rice cookers, air fryers, tuner-less TVs. In the previous post I argued the category change is a channel change. It also changes what customers expect from service. A phone is replaced in two years. An appliance is used for ten. Sending a phone back is acceptable. Sending a rice cooker back is not. Japan's appliance industry has a convention on how long repair parts are kept, with guidelines by category (eight years for TVs, nine for refrigerators), and consumers assume you will follow it.

So the Akihabara service center and the tenth store in Nagoya are one decision seen from two sides. If you want to sell appliances, you first have to answer who will repair them for ten years.

BYD is on the same road

BYD's mini stores noted that BYD's partnership with Meiji Sangyo began with training technicians for high-voltage batteries. The showrooms came after. The subsidy scoring sheet also has a line for maintenance systems and technician training. One sells cars and the other rice cookers, and they went in the same order. First someone who can fix it, then scale.

What a company entering Japan can do

Before opening the first store, write "what happens when it breaks" on one page. Where it is repaired, how long it takes, who is responsible, what it costs. The page can describe your own service center or a Japanese repair contractor. Appliances can use nationwide repair networks. Software can use a Japanese-language support desk with an SLA. The answer just has to be specific, down to the place and the hours.

Service points are sited differently from stores. Stores go where customers spend their weekends. Service points go at transport hubs that customers can reach on the way to somewhere else. Akihabara doesn't follow the logic of Xiaomi's store locations. It follows the logic of a service center: the electronics district, known nationwide, reachable directly by train.

Budget repair as a cost of sales. In Japan a brand without a service point doesn't merely have weak after-sales. It doesn't sell. Put it in the first-year budget, on the same sheet as hiring and sales ramp.

Xiaomi paused at five stores to open a service center, then opened five stores in five months. It was slow at first because it was answering the question. It was fast afterwards because the answer was already there.