Lei Jun's message to Xiaomi's followers

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In 2015, Xiaomi has entered its fifth year of development. Xiaomi Technology and its founder Lei Jun are standing at a new starting point.

"The past five years have been about the layout of Xiaomi's ecological chain, and the next five years will be about optimization." Lei Jun said in an exclusive interview with the author, "Now all the cards are on the table, and Xiaomi's layout has been completed."

Five years ago, when Lei Jun founded Xiaomi Technology, the industry was constantly questioning the Xiaomi model, and the Internet industry speculated that Lei Jun was playing a big game. In fact, few people knew what Lei Jun's game was, what Xiaomi would do, and how it would do it. When Lei Jun proposed the "triathlon (software + hardware + Internet)", there were many voices of doubt in the industry. Two years later, in 2012, Lei Jun first proposed Internet thinking, which was also questioned and criticized at the same time as crazy pursuit - later, they all became buzzwords of this era, and Xiaomi became the industry's popular icon.

Being imitated and misunderstood, it is no longer important how Xiaomi has come to where it is today. Xiaomi’s followers want to know more about where Xiaomi will go?
The past five years: Xiaomi in the lead, the industry behind

Will putting all the cards on the table bring more competitive pressure to Xiaomi? Lei Jun did not answer this question. From historical experience, Lei Jun has always revealed Xiaomi's thinking logic and methodology. In the early days of "triathlon", later "Internet thinking", as well as sense of participation, fan economy, positioning theory, and wind outlet theory, Lei Jun has talked about them everywhere in meetings over the past few years. Xiaomi seems to have no secrets.

Xiaomi's model has no shortage of imitators. Once Lei Jun promoted the "triathlon (software + hardware + Internet)" model, many Internet companies, startups, and traditional mobile phone companies began to pay tribute to this product model: Internet companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and 360, startups such as Smartisan Technology and Dakele Mobile, and traditional mobile phone companies such as Tianyu Mobile, Haier, Changhong, Hisense, Huawei, Lenovo, and ZTE.

Looking back, 2012 was the year when the entire industry learned from and paid tribute to Xiaomi's "Triathlon". This process continued until 2014 when the media-hyped Hammer Technology finally settled down, and imitators of the "Triathlon" product model began to reflect collectively.

After that, Lei Jun began to talk about channel revolution, and Xiaomi.com became one of the core competitive advantages: it was Xiaomi.com's own-brand e-commerce model that created an extremely good price-performance ratio for Xiaomi mobile phones, making it possible to "exceed user expectations." In 2014, the industry began to learn from Xiaomi's e-commerce model: most manufacturers began to build their own e-commerce websites while using third-party e-commerce platforms such as Tmall and JD.com.

But the results were also minimal, so Lei Jun started talking about building an ecological chain.

From the beginning, the "fan economy" based on social media such as Weibo, WeChat, and QQ Moments has been criticized by the industry, but now it has been recognized by the entire industry. Fan economy has never been a secret, and there has always been no shortage of imitators. A strange result is that no one has reached the height of Xiaomi.

Xiaomi seems to have never had any secrets, and even Lei Jun himself finds it strange: Why can the same thinking and methods lead Xiaomi to the right path, but lead others into the ditch? Many people conclude that Lei Jun is a model worker in the industry and Xiaomi has the best execution in the industry. However, are the execution capabilities of companies such as 360 and Lenovo worse than Xiaomi?

Five years later, Lei Jun began to reflect on this issue. "The company has been running too fast and there is no time to think about this issue," Lei Jun said in an interview with the author. He now roughly concludes that from a methodological point of view, each company has only learned part of Xiaomi, and has not learned all of Xiaomi; from a logical point of view, many companies that learned from Xiaomi not only went astray, but also went in the opposite direction, going in the opposite direction, and finally going against the trend. He said, "Xiaomi will share the complete logic with the industry."

Few people have explored the origin of Xiaomi's logic. Lei Jun's complete explanation is as follows: Everything starts from reality. What is the most fundamental change that the Internet has brought to this society? It is symmetry. Simply put, it is the symmetry of information. The symmetry of power and the symmetry of resource distribution are all based on the symmetry of information. He said: From the perspective of information symmetry, marketing should be authentic, not over-promoting. Excessive propaganda can be easily discovered by users using tools such as Internet search. How to truly attract consumers, you must make the product the best; how to make the product the best, you must focus; if the product is the best, it will have a good reputation; at the same time, everything in the Internet era is developing rapidly, information is flowing rapidly, and no company has any secrets. The fittest survive, and they must be faster than all opponents. Lei Jun believes in one sentence: The only way to defeat martial arts in the world is to be fast.

However, this logic, which has been transformed by a large number of marketing masters supported by Xiaomi, is this: in the Internet age, information can reach users instantly; with powerful marketing and the personalization of enterprises and products, a person or a company can accumulate fans overnight. Thus, fans are generated, and the company will be successful in everything.

Is the Internet era an era of deception or an era of sincerity? Lei Jun believes it is the latter, while Xiaomi's marketing master believes it is the former. He believes that the Internet thinking of Hammer can be put to rest. In an era of sincerity, it is most important to tell the truth to users, and everything returns to the product itself. Whether it is "the crossroads of technology and humanities" or "love and personality", without sincerity, the fans you build overnight may also leave you in an instant, because the truth will always come to light.
The cards for the next five years are already on the table

Lei Jun said in an interview with the author: Xiaomi's cards are all on the table, and the layout has been completed. According to Lei Jun's description, Xiaomi has the following cards in hand: three major hardware businesses: Xiaomi mobile phones, Xiaomi TVs, and smart homes; four major Internet applications: MIUI operating system, cloud services, big data, game center, and Xiaomi Finance; two major ecosystems: Internet content ecology and smart hardware ecology; and Xiaomi.com and international expansion are connected to the client.

Lei Jun said: What was not fully discussed was cloud services and big data; another thing that was not put on the table was the chip business. Even though the chip design business was not put on the table, everyone in the industry knew about it. Lei Jun said that the next five years will basically develop according to this layout. Lei Jun's plan is: if each direction is successful, then Xiaomi Technology will be successful.

On June 10, Qualcomm announced the resignation of Wang Xiang, president of the Greater China region; Lei Jun then announced that Wang Xiang would join Xiaomi as senior vice president, responsible for strategic cooperation and important partnerships. The joining of Wang Xiang, who has a background in Qualcomm, sent a strong signal to the outside world that Xiaomi's chip strategy is moving forward. Previously, Lei Jun said that he planned to invest $1 billion in cloud services, which would be mainly used to purchase a large number of servers and lease a large amount of bandwidth resources, because cloud computing is the cornerstone of Xiaomi's business.

Xiaomi’s plan for the next five years has already begun.

For Lei Jun and Xiaomi Technology, what is the difference between the past five years and the next five years? Lei Jun said that the past five years were about layout, while the next five years will be about optimization.

Lei Jun has been talking about the ecological chain recently, which is actually to show Xiaomi's cards. If you want to learn from Xiaomi, you should learn as much as possible. Even so, it is difficult to learn from Xiaomi: Xiaomi Technology took five years to complete the above ecological chain layout. How long does it take other companies? From the perspective of commercial competition, a meticulous layout itself is a competitive moat. It is still difficult to imitate Xiaomi.

Lei Jun mentioned to me in an interview that he hopes to transform China's manufacturing industry with Xiaomi's thinking. In an interview, he said that Xiaomi-style innovation is not only the innovation of Xiaomi, but may be the innovation of all Chinese manufacturing industries: in the past 30 years, the driving force of China's manufacturing industry has been the demographic dividend, low cost, and low price; the Xiaomi model proves that by using Internet thinking, based on Internet technology, relying on new business operation models, and adding innovative product models, China's manufacturing industry will have a huge "innovation dividend" space. Compared with the demographic dividend, the space for innovation dividend is larger, more lasting, and healthier.

Lei Jun mentioned that in the past 150 years, China has been plagued by internal and external troubles, and the pace of China's technological innovation has lagged far behind the world. The era of technological innovation output represented by the four great inventions has long become a distant memory. It is precisely this 150 years of lag that has brought China a huge "innovation dividend". In the same Internet era, the earth has become a village, technology has no borders, and China is becoming a member of the global technological innovation team. The world is flat, and technological innovation is globally synchronized and integrated - this is a huge outlet.

As China moves from "demographic dividend" to "innovation dividend", what is Xiaomi's mission?

Lei Jun said that after four years of development, under the pressure of Xiaomi, the industry has become Xiaomi-like in some form, either from a marketing perspective or from a product perspective. He believes that after exploration and experimentation, they will all view the industry from the "symmetrical" thinking of the Internet world, and Chinese manufacturing companies as a whole will become "dancers on the cusp of the wind."

Lei Jun said that Xiaomi's dream is "the sea of ​​stars". Many people interpret "the sea of ​​stars" differently from Lei Jun: Lei Jun's explanation is to use Internet thinking to upgrade China's manufacturing to China's intelligent manufacturing, and Xiaomi Technology will help complete this transformation through investment, industrial resource introduction, and business wisdom output.

Lei Jun said that it is a small dream for Xiaomi to become a $100 billion company, or a $300 billion or $500 billion company. For Lei Jun, realizing this dream is a big dream.