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Source: Time Weekly Author: Shen Jinrui

Lei Jun's annual speech was photographed by a reporter from Time Weekly

"For more than three months, every day has been like a dream."

On March 28, Xiaomi Mi SU7 was officially released and became a phenomenal hit overnight. This was a surprise so heavy that Lei Jun felt it was unreal, and this surprise came from a shock.

In his fifth annual speech held on the evening of July 19, Lei Jun said that Xiaomi's car-making was the result of an accident. At around 7 a.m. on January 15, 2021, Lei Jun received a call from a friend and was told that Xiaomi had been sanctioned by the United States.

On March 30, 2021, Xiaomi announced that it had officially decided to build a car, with Lei Jun personally leading the team and investing $10 billion in the next 10 years. Subsequently, Lei Jun "fired" his full-time driver and learned to drive a racing car himself. In the three years since he started building cars, Lei Jun has test-driven more than 170 cars and compiled more than 200,000 words of test drive notes and materials.

Lei Jun's annual speech is a compilation of his personal growth and a general history of Xiaomi. Starting from 2020, Lei Jun will hold an annual speech in August every year, each time focusing on a theme, covering aspects such as technological innovation, corporate management, and personal growth. This year, Lei Jun's annual speech was brought forward to July, with the theme of "Courage", sharing Xiaomi's three years of experience in car manufacturing.

Lei Jun is still the same Lei Jun. He is dressed in a casual suit, wandering among various Internet memes, loving to make fun of himself, being sentimental, and opening his mouth with a news headline. The whole speech was filled with laughter and cheers from the audience.

Lei Jun is no longer the same Lei Jun. From entrepreneur to industry leader, from product orientation to ecosystem construction, from domestic market to international vision, Lei Jun's changes are also obvious.

Unchanging courage and Xiaomi's "three iron laws"

On the eve of the speech, someone compared Lei Jun to the "male protagonist of a cool novel" - he graduated from a prestigious university, made his first fortune in college, became the general manager of Kingsoft soon after graduation, started Xiaomi and became one of the world's top 500 companies, and fought a great battle in the automotive industry... Lei Jun responded that life is never a cool novel, but a series of difficult breakthroughs. "What did I rely on to get to where I am today, and what do I rely on to break through again? My answer is courage."

After being informed of the sanctions, Lei Jun convened an emergency board meeting to discuss countermeasures, "Almost all executives support (making cars), but I think the risks are too great."

Xiaomi was in a turbulent period at that time. Two and a half years after its listing, the company was undergoing a transformation from a guerrilla force to a regular army. At the same time, the high-end mobile phone market had just started, and the young executive Zhou Shouzi, who the company had high hopes for, also resigned. In addition, Lei Jun was also worried that he would "lose his integrity in his later years" - "Starting a business is so difficult, do I really want to do it again? If I fail in making cars, will I end up in disgrace?"

On the other side of the concern, the board of directors asked a soul-searching question, "If you can't make mobile phones, what will you do with your 30,000 to 40,000 employees?" Lei Jun thought about it for a week and decided to make cars. "This is not an impulse, nor is it a stopgap measure. I only have seven words in my mind: I will go even if there are thousands of people against me."

Lei Jun's annual speech was photographed by a reporter from Time Weekly

Lei Jun's courage was evident at the beginning of his business, but in the 14 years since Xiaomi was founded, no one has ever described Lei Jun as "reckless". In fact, Lei Jun's so-called "courage" has always been centered around Xiaomi's "three iron laws". Whether it is the path to high-end development, building its own system, or going overseas, under the guidance of the framework, Lei Jun's "courage" appears to be methodical and rhythmic.

In his first speech in 2020, Lei Jun defined "technology-based, cost-effective, and making the coolest products" as "Xiaomi's three iron laws." If we count the milestone events in Xiaomi's development history, we can't do without keywords such as "technology" and "users."

In 2022, Lei Jun mentioned in his speech that Xiaomi Mi 12 and Mi 12S failed to meet expectations for two consecutive generations and suffered severe losses. The debate over whether Xiaomi Mi 13 should continue to be a small-screen product was very heated, with more than half of the employees opposing it.

The reason is that it is a huge challenge for R&D to pack all the functions of an all-round flagship into a small body and achieve an all-round flagship experience. What's more difficult is that even if it is done, the cost is very high and users may not pay for it because small-sized phones do not look as valuable as large-screen phones.

Lei Jun insists that the feel of the hand is the most important user experience. Although it is not reflected in the parameter table and it is difficult to explain clearly what is good about it, users can immediately feel it once they get their hands on it. "Our R&D team is fighting a desperate battle. During the epidemic, in order not to delay progress, everyone ate and lived in the office and lived a collective life like "military training."

"Xiaomi 13 lived up to expectations and performed extremely well, with many experiences even significantly surpassing the iPhone. This time, everyone completely agreed with 'experience first' from the bottom of their hearts." Lei Jun said that Xiaomi 13 enabled the company to make the leap from parameter leadership to experience priority.

In this year's speech, Lei Jun once again showed his emphasis on core technology and users. Lei Jun believes that China's automotive industry chain is very mature and it is relatively easy to build a car. "Three years ago, many people advised me to quickly launch the car and find a OEM, and never do everything myself. We thought about it at the beginning, but soon we made up our minds to start with core technology."

"This is because Xiaomi suffered a big loss before. When we started our business 14 years ago, we started with model innovation. Although we grew very fast at the beginning, our foundation was not solid, and we encountered many setbacks later. So, this time, we made up our minds from the beginning to not take shortcuts, not make acquisitions, not do OEM, start from the core technology, invest ten times more, and earnestly build a good car."

"We are very determined to invest in core technologies. For example, we are working on three generations of motors at the same time. For large-scale die-casting, we started with two sets. For intelligent driving, we have fully developed two sets of solutions, pure vision and lidar."

In the early days of car manufacturing, the Xiaomi R&D team found a lot of research reports, started to study and research, and wrote hundreds of pages of analysis materials. Lei Jun poured cold water on everyone and said: Don't make it so complicated, just build a car that Xiaomi engineers want to buy. A hundred reports cannot replace face-to-face communication with a real user.

After learning that users consider the temperature inside the car as a criterion for purchasing a car, Lei Jun personally participated in the winter and summer tests of the car. At the end of 2022, Xiaomi's engineering vehicles entered the winter testing phase. In Heihe in winter, the temperature dropped to minus 30 or 40 degrees Celsius. "This is the first big test for Xiaomi Auto. The person in charge of the winter test was very surprised when he saw me. He said that he had been working for more than 20 years, and this was the first time he saw the chairman of a car company come to the winter test in person."

In early August 2023, Lei Jun participated in the summer test again. In Turpan in summer, the temperature reached 50 degrees. The car was exposed to the sun for a whole afternoon, and it was so hot that it was impossible to sit in it. With direct experience, Lei Jun sighed: "Some benchmark cars have a temperature of up to 90 degrees inside the car. The moment I got out of the car, I felt that it was so important to do a good job of sun protection! The temperature in our car can be more than ten degrees lower than others."

Changing brand positioning and corporate strategy

On the evening of July 19, when Lei Jun gave a speech, Xiaomi released the new generation of foldable screen flagship Xiaomi MIX Fold 4, with a starting price of 8999 yuan. It is reported that MIX Fold 4 is the Xiaomi flagship with the highest self-developed density, using eight Surge self-developed chips and three core self-developed technologies such as the keel hinge 2.0, full carbon architecture, and three-layer five-sided motherboard.

The biggest surprise at the launch was the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra Prototype, a pure electric car launched by Xiaomi. Lei Jun said that the goal of the car is to "become the fastest four-door electric car on the Nürburgring within ten years and continue to challenge Porsche."

In his speech that night, Lei Jun joked that when the price of SU7 was not disclosed, someone called on him to lower the price of the car to 99,000 yuan. Behind the joke, it is not difficult to see Lei Jun's determination to reshape the brand positioning. The era of Xiaomi phones priced at 1,999 yuan is a thing of the past.

In his 2021 speech, Lei Jun shared Xiaomi's experience of breaking through the high-end market. On July 9, 2018, Xiaomi landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but its stock price fell as soon as it was listed. Subsequently, affected by the geopolitical economic situation, Xiaomi's stock price continued to fall. Lei Jun said at the time: "The more the stock price is low, the more we hold our breath and invest desperately in research and development to break through the high-end market."

He said that imaging technology is the technological high ground of the mobile phone industry. At that time, Xiaomi team members proposed to put the camera sensor on the mobile phone. "The design director Zhu Yin immediately went crazy. If so, the mobile phone might be too thick for users to bear."

After repeated debates, Xiaomi finally reached a consensus to make a mobile phone specifically for mobile phone photography enthusiasts, pursuing the pinnacle of camera experience. When developing Xiaomi 11 Ultra, the camera department spent 18 months and a huge amount of money to customize the GN2 sensor. "After the phone was designed, the photo effect was amazing, comparable to Sony's black card, but the camera's bulge and Deco (decorative accessories) were also very exaggerated. This is really a bold design." Lei Jun recalled.

"After the launch, Mi fans gave very strong reviews. I think the main reason is that Ultra is too good! It won the first place in the global total score of DXOMARK (a mobile phone camera rating website) and topped the list for 122 days. I have been worried about the design issues, but Mi fans also like it very much. They think it has personality and is recognizable." Lei Jun said.

Lei Jun has a high-end dream. In his speeches over the past five years, except for 2022, the keyword "high-end" was mentioned in the other four years.

Competition in the current smartphone industry is intensifying, and smart products such as mobile phones, home appliances, and cars are entering a period of interconnected exploration. Xiaomi's pursuit of high-end products extends from price to software configuration, system fluency, and brand influence.

The systematic construction of the group's products means that it will have greater market dominance in the future. In October 2023, Xiaomi Pengpai OS was launched, and Lei Jun announced that the Xiaomi Group's strategy was officially upgraded to "full ecosystem for people, cars and homes". "In the past, Xiaomi has been learning, growing and accumulating. Today, Xiaomi has ushered in a leap forward. That is, to integrate personal devices, smart homes and smart travel into an organic whole with people as the center."

In his speech on July 19, Lei Jun emphasized Xiaomi's "full ecosystem for people, cars and homes" strategy for the new decade, "fully empowered by AI, using the Internet model to empower all categories. 14 years later, Xiaomi will use AI to do all categories again."

From an initial entrepreneur to an industry leader, from a product-oriented advocate to an ecosystem builder, from a domestic player to an international player, Lei Jun has undergone a lot of changes since starting his business, and Xiaomi has also made a lot of unexpected progress.

For example, Xiaomi, Apple and Huawei have formed a new "high-end first lineup"; overseas, Xiaomi has ranked among the top three in the world for 16 consecutive quarters with a market share of 15%; in the automotive field, Xiaomi SU7 set an industry record in terms of first-month order lock and delivery, with a large number of female users and BBA car owners purchasing it, and Apple users accounting for 51.9%.

Lei Jun has many sides. He can be an expert traveling between Turpan and Heihe to measure the temperature of cars. He can also be a company leader who leads Xiaomi into the Fortune 500. He can also create hot topics and contribute jokes to netizens. Xiaomi also has many sides. Lei Jun once said that 99% of the questions have standard answers. But Xiaomi, which bears Lei Jun's imprint, seems to make the outside world never guess its ultimate form.