Xiaomi's Japan stores are catching up with Apple's. Why the first one was in Saitama

Who you sell to should decide where your first store goes in Japan, and Xiaomi is the clearest recent example. It entered Japan in December 2019 and ran only pop-ups for five years. On 22 March 2025 it opened its first permanent store. It didn't pick Shibuya or Ginza. It picked an AEON mall in Urawa-Misono, Saitama, an hour by train from central Tokyo: a corner near the middle of the ground floor, next to the 300-yen shop 3COINS, about 130 square meters.

With the Nagoya store on 18 July 2026, Xiaomi had ten stores in Japan. Apple has eleven. Toyo Keizai ran a headline in March saying Xiaomi's store count had passed Apple's. By my count it is catching up and hasn't passed yet. Put the two lists side by side, though, and something more interesting than the count shows up. Apple's eleven are all flagship sites in city centers. Nine of Xiaomi's ten are in suburban and near-suburban shopping malls.

Before where, who

The first store carried over 160 products. Phones were the centerpiece, but most of the floor went to rice cookers, air fryers, robot vacuums, air purifiers, scales and TVs. At the opening, Xiaomi Japan's head of product planning said the store was designed so customers could see the value of smart-home products, with wider aisles so a family could browse together.

That sentence is the whole site-selection logic. People buying a phone go to Shibuya. People buying a rice cooker don't. The place where a family wanders on a weekend and picks up an air fryer on the way is AEON. AEON supplies the footfall, and Xiaomi already worked with AEON in other Asian markets, so the negotiation didn't start from zero. Xiaomi wasn't choosing "Saitama" as a place. It was choosing a customer: families buying appliances in a mall.

The order of expansion

Store two was Kawaguchi, Saitama, in April 2025. Then Chiba. Only after that came the first store inside Tokyo's 23 wards, Kameido, in December 2025. In March and April 2026 four Kansai stores opened at once, three in AEON malls and one in a LaLaport. In July, Nagoya. All in malls, all the same format, two to three hundred products each.

Most companies entering Japan do it the other way round. They open store one in central Tokyo because HQ wants an address for the press release, and store two in Osaka because Kansai has to be covered. Then they discover that two rents have eaten the annual budget, and the visitors are tourists and the curious. Xiaomi proved the format and the customer on suburban rent first, then copied the template into other malls. Apple's model is a destination. Customers travel for it. Xiaomi's is adjacency. The customers are already there.

From phones to appliances: what changed is the channel

I agree with Toyo Keizai's other call, that in Japan Xiaomi is turning from a phone maker into a lifestyle-appliance brand. There's more to that than adding categories. Japan's phone channel is controlled by three carriers, and a new brand has no shelf there. The appliance channel is mass retailers plus the brand's own stores, and that door is open. Changing category is a way of switching to a channel you can actually get into. Decide who you sell to first made the same point for B2B. The customer decides the channel, and the channel decides the location.

What a company entering Japan can borrow

Use store one to test. Save the announcement for later. Pick a site with rent you can control, steady footfall and overlap with your target customer. Watch sales per square meter and repeat visits for six months, then decide on store two.

Take "Tokyo" out of the site criteria and put in "where are my customers on a weekend". For Xiaomi that is AEON. For a B2B software company it might be an industrial park near Osaka. For a restaurant brand, a commuter line.

Make the format a template. Xiaomi's ten stores are really one store, which is why the tenth took far less time to prepare than the first. Japanese commercial landlords screen new brands hard. A template that has worked at AEON gets you through the door at LaLaport.

Apple is in Ginza because Apple's customers will go to Ginza for it. Where will your customers go for you? If the honest answer is nowhere, put the store where they were already going.