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Behind the courage, there is still a half secret that has not been told

Special author: Chen Xuning

Cover source: Screenshot of Lei Jun’s annual speech

The theme word of Lei Jun’s fifth annual speech is courage.

Although a lot of information has been circulated in different forms on the Internet before, this is indeed the first time that Lei Jun has fully told a story about courage and the success of a latecomer sitting at the poker table in front of tens of millions of viewers.

In recent years, we often hear such arguments as "all efforts are in vain" and "as long as you are willing to endure hardships, there will be endless hardships". It is like a cold wind, trying to blow out the flame in our hearts and make us doubt our struggle and dreams.

The extraordinary thing about Lei Jun's annual speech is that the growth process of himself and Xiaomi is an inspirational story of a latecomer achieving a counterattack through continuous efforts and hard work, wrapped in a beautiful coat woven by courage and dreams.

Xiaomi has both innovation and courage, but these are not what it does best, nor are they the source of Lei Jun's unstoppable progress in leading Xiaomi forward.

The decision-making process and pace of Lei Jun's car manufacturing are almost identical to those of Xiaomi's entry into the smartphone industry ten years ago.

After Apple released the first iPhone and before Xiaomi released its first mobile phone (2007-2010), some brands and products have emerged:

HTC and Google jointly launched the world's first Android phone, HTC G1; Samsung launched the Galaxy series; Meizu's first smartphone, M8, was launched; LG, Motorola, BlackBerry and other manufacturers also started to make moves. Even Nokia and BlackBerry, which were later lamented or mocked for "failing to keep up with the trend of smartphones", launched their first touch-screen phones in 2008.

The first generation iPhone ushered in a new era of smartphones and also inspired other companies to develop smartphones.

Whether it was blindly following the trend, trying to make up for the loss, or following the trend, during this period, all kinds of products appeared on the market, promoting the development and popularization of smartphones.

The dreamer in those years was Steve Jobs.

Lei Jun made mobile phones step by step. In his own words, "When you do something, you must understand the level of your peers and do sufficient market research."

Adequate market research is a process of constantly sorting out chips and calculating the winning rate. More calculations lead to victory, less calculations lead to loss.

Xiaomi officially announced that it would build cars in 2021, almost ten years after Tesla released the Model S. At this point, although there are still some controversies, the judgment that the future of the automotive industry is new energy vehicles has a high degree of consensus and has been confirmed by market data.

Therefore, whether Lei Jun conducted "85 interviews with more than 200 people in 70 days" or not, it did not affect his final conclusion: "Smart electric vehicles are the general trend." "We must build cars. We must also make plans for long-term investment, at least $10 billion."

There are many who want to overthrow Tesla. But even now, Tesla has not encountered a decent opponent. From the perspective of business operations, by the end of 2022, domestic NIO, Xiaopeng and Li Auto have not been able to reach the turning point of turning losses into profits at the threshold of 100,000 vehicles. The PPT car-making companies with a crisper texture are just talking on paper, and the new forces are barely mass-produced and cannot sell. They all died quickly after a brief kiss of the romance of new energy.

The dreamer in the new energy vehicle industry is Musk. His latest dream for Wall Street is the entry-level electric car Model 2, which costs $25,000.

Lei Jun is neither a dreamer nor even the earliest trend follower.

In the era of smart phones, the rising star is iPhone, and the “chief trend-followers” ​​are HTC and Samsung. In the era of electric cars, the rising star is Tesla, and the “chief trend-followers” ​​are Wei, Xiao and Li.

But Lei Jun's strength is that once he is determined to do something, he will be the one to wring out every last drop of water from the towel. When he gets ruthless, he may even wring the towel to pieces.

As Snow Leopard Finance judged in an article two years ago, "The story of the new rich subverting the old rich sounds beautiful, but in the real business world, it is more of a cold reality that giants catch up and new companies become pathfinders."

From this point of view, Xiaomi's strategy is very similar to that of Tencent, which is good at catching up from behind: taking the role of a follower in market competition, observing and learning from the pioneers in the market, and then quickly iterating through its own advantages to ultimately surpass them.

In this year's speech, Lei Jun made another book popular: When the Stars Shine. Recently, there is also a book called Elegy of the Country People, which is said to be read by people in the financial circle.

About two years ago, they also pursued another book: "The Navarre Codex".

At the end of the book, Navarre, a well-known Silicon Valley angel investor, recommended more than a dozen books, but he emphasized that these were not all of his reading sources:

When I share my reading list, I don't mention about 2/3 of the books. I don't mention them because I'm embarrassed, because they don't sound like good books, and the topics they discuss seem trivial or silly. So I don't share all the books I read with others. I read everything, including books that others think are garbage, and even books that others think should be condemned. I also read books that are completely opposite to my views to inspire me to think.

Drucker said that behind every successful organization, someone has made a very difficult decision.

We are curious about what was the most difficult decision for Lei Jun regarding car manufacturing? The hardships, difficulties and confusion he revealed on stage were too superficial.

Lei Jun's annual speech is like Navarre's reading list. He only said half of it, and the unspoken half may hide more important secrets.