When the trend has become a thing of the past, Lei Jun's Xiaomi mobile phone has turned from a myth into a joke

"Do you know what Xiaomi's flagship phone is now?"

“I’m not sure. Who still uses Xiaomi phones now?”

There are many conversations like this. The setback in the mobile phone business makes Xiaomi founder Lei Jun look less vigorous.

Back on December 18, 2011, when the Xiaomi Mi 1 was first officially sold online, 300,000 units were sold out in 5 minutes. This was a miracle for a startup at the time. That year, people got to know Xiaomi and Lei Jun, and realized that smartphones could be both cheap and popular. The sales of 7.19 million units directly made Lei Jun a god.

In the five years since Xiaomi was founded, the company's valuation has increased 180 times, reaching a staggering $45 billion in 2014, making it the world's most valuable startup. Lei Jun proudly said at the time that "capital is eyeing Xiaomi's future."

But this "future" is a bit too short, only one year. In 2015, Xiaomi's mobile phone business encountered a crisis, sales volume dropped from 120 million units to 70 million units, and the market value shrank directly to 4 billion US dollars. The capital market is always the most ruthless, because "they can no longer see Xiaomi's future."

After the boom, Xiaomi was badly hurt

In 2012, when the flagship models of Samsung and HTC were still priced at 3,000 to 4,000 yuan, Xiaomi launched the world's first dual-core 1.5G smartphone, and the price was only 1,999 yuan. With the continuous innovation of MIUI, Xiaomi attracted a large number of mobile phone enthusiasts, and the hunger marketing strategy of low price and high configuration attracted consumers.

With excellent products, advantageous prices, top-notch marketing, and the popularity of smartphones in China, Xiaomi took off on the cusp of the trend, coupled with China's huge demographic dividend. The "trend cusp theory" turned Lei Jun into "Lei Bus".

But once the boom was over, Xiaomi was badly hurt.

Things are different now than they were in the past. They are different from when Xiaomi mobile phone came out in 2012. Whether it is a thousand yuan phone or a two thousand yuan phone, there are many products that can replace Xiaomi mobile phone, including Huawei, LeTV, Dasheng, and the sudden blue and green army.

When the hunger marketing gradually failed, Xiaomi could only rely on other marketing methods to maintain sales momentum, including many malicious deceptions and frauds. It was from this time that negative news about Xiaomi continued to hit in various forms.

For example, Xiaomi's nonsense "black technology", such as the "PPT gate" and "coin gate" of Xiaomi notebooks, the "Tianma gate" of Redmi Note2 screen being inferior and passed off as good ones, the "leakage gate" of transmitting user sensitive information in plain text, the "chip gate" of Xiaomi 3 China Unicom version replacing 9274AB with 8974AB, the "disguised price increase" of Xiaomi TV 3s, quarrels, fraud, and passing off inferior products as good ones... step by step, Xiaomi has been pulled down from the altar.

A mobile phone that makes users extremely embarrassed

In the past two years, the domestic smartphone market has reached its peak, the demographic dividend has been exhausted, and various mobile phone brands have entered a melee stage, launching low-priced, high-performance smartphones one after another. At this time, Xiaomi's cost-effectiveness advantage has disappeared, and the low-price image it has always created has led to Xiaomi's mobile phone premium ability being basically negative.

On Zhihu, some users even raised the question of "how to remove the logo of Xiaomi phone". When users began to feel that using Xiaomi phone was a loss of value, things had already developed to the point where it was difficult to reverse.

Lei Jun also thought about changing the brand image, so he later launched the "new domestic products", "national mobile phone", and invited spokespersons, but users still did not buy it.

After the failed attempt to enter the mid-to-high-end market, the curse of "if it is not cheaper than competitors with the same configuration, it will not be sold" just strangled Xiaomi.

Unlike LeEco, which has a complete ecosystem and can truly profit from hardware, Xiaomi can only pass on the price pressure to its partners such as parts suppliers. MediaTek's chips targeting the mid-to-high-end market were completely beaten back to their original form after Xiaomi adapted them to the Redmi phone, wasting the vacuum in the high-end market created by the popularity of Qualcomm Snapdragon 810.

The popularity of the newly launched flagship Xiaomi Mi 5s and Mi 5s Plus was also overshadowed by the arrival of iPhone 7. We had taken it for granted that Mi 5s was an upgraded version of Mi 5, and Mi 5s Plus was definitely a high-end version, but what users never expected was that Lei Jun came up with a phone that was similar to LeTV Coolpad COOL 1. The 3G memory controversy also made users very dissatisfied. Xiaomi complains about its competitors and blackmails itself every day, so why can't it reflect on why it leaves so many handles for its competitors?

What impressed Mi fans a few years ago about Xiaomi phones was their deep insight into user needs. Each model would have an outstanding advantage that directly hit the pain points of Mi fans. But now, perhaps because Xiaomi is too popular, it is also getting further and further away from the expectations of Mi fans.

A collapse of product culture

Many people say that they are increasingly confused about Xiaomi, which wants to make mobile phones one moment and open department stores the next. They believe that Xiaomi's success is based on nothing more than gimmicks, and its decline is nothing more than a change of original intention.

Whether it is Xiaomi 4 or Xiaomi 5, then 5s, Xiaomi TV, it always feels like Xiaomi is forcing itself to sell products. "Adding ads to MIUI is also a bad mentality. I can't believe that the product manager made this decision and asked himself whether the product experience was right, but he still went ahead with it. This kind of forcing itself to go ahead used to be OK. Maybe it was OK five years ago, three years ago, but it's not OK in the past two years, because the demographic dividend of smartphones has ended and consumers have become smarter." said a senior Mi fan.

The rapid growth also made Xiaomi itself malnourished. It cannot compete with Huawei in terms of patents, OPPO in offline business, or LeTV in ecosystem. The Internet marketing of the past has long been learned by mobile phone brands such as Hammer, Meizu, Coolpad, and OnePlus. What is more frightening is the collapse of product culture, which has led to a large outflow of talents. According to people familiar with the matter, Xiaomi’s current talent echelon is insufficient, and it once showed symptoms of blood shortage. Only more than 100 of the top 500 Spartans are left.
For a startup company, products are always the foundation.

The failure of its boutique lines, the collapse of its brand image, its marketing is full of malice, its offline layout is weak, the online competition is fierce, its overseas development is hindered, its supply chain relationships are tense, it is prone to plagiarism, and it lacks innovation. These are the problems Xiaomi is currently facing, and these problems have instantly brought a company that was once in its heyday back to its original form.

If Xiaomi wants to return to its peak, the market does not leave much time for Lei Jun.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.