Does the world need Xiaomi?

Celebrity appearances, live streams by internet celebrities, high-end PPTs, cheers from fans, anticipated new products, spirited speakers...

The Xiaomi press conference on July 27 can be said to have the most lively atmosphere among all the large-scale Xiaomi press conferences in the past two years.

At the same time, this is the third consecutive year that I have participated in Xiaomi's summer new product launch conference. Although the time is not long, it has witnessed Xiaomi's decline from its heyday to its bottleneck.

At the press conference, Lei Jun inadvertently repeated a sentence three times, "The world needs Xiaomi."

It has always been Lei Jun's wish to make Xiaomi a great Internet company.

How to position Xiaomi today?

"I don't want to be seen as second," Lei Jun once said at an event.

But the fact is that Huawei's mobile phone business grew rapidly last year, selling 108 million units and taking the top spot from Xiaomi. In the first quarter of 2016, Xiaomi's mobile phone shipments were 10.9 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 26%. In the same period, global mobile phone sales fell by 0.5%.

As the development of Xiaomi's mobile phone business slows down, more and more people begin to doubt whether Xiaomi, which lacks independent innovation, can still grow into the second Apple or Google.

However, in sharp contrast to the decline in the main mobile phone business, other products in Xiaomi's ecological chain are gradually being accepted by more and more consumers. Xiaomi, which is good at taking advantage of the trend, also proposed the concept of "new domestic products", which not only responded to national policies but also improved its brand image.

In a recent article published by Lei Jun, he also clearly stated that he wanted to allow ordinary people to use high-quality products, and that a brand new Xiaomi would be unveiled in the next six months to a year.

So what does this new Xiaomi look like?

I still remember that netizens used to mock Xiaomi for not doing its job properly by using Xiaomi Department Store. So why not just go with the flow and "become China's MUJI"? This is the brand that Xiaomi officials often use as a benchmark recently.

"Sometimes we don't know how to express Xiaomi, and sometimes people don't know what Xiaomi is doing. We make mobile phones, mobile power supplies, air purifiers, rice cookers, and electric fans, and it seems that we are not focused. In fact, when you look at Xiaomi from a different angle, you will feel that this company is extremely focused," Lei Jun explained.

In the future, Xiaomi needs to work hard to get rid of the shackles of the concept of mobile phone manufacturers. Lei Jun hopes that Xiaomi can represent the progress of Made in China. How to do it? Enter 100 industries. In the past five years, Xiaomi has successfully operated the online sales model. In the next five years, they will gradually focus on Xiaomi Home. "Like MUJI, there are only 50 to 100 products in the store, and they rely on 50 to 100 products to conquer consumers."

Does the world need Xiaomi?

Let’s go back to the question at the beginning of the article: “Does the world need Xiaomi?”

The answer is just as Lei Jun emphasized, the world needs Xiaomi. In other words, the world needs emerging companies like Xiaomi to bring more impetus for development.

Just a few years ago, the birth of Xiaomi mobile phone quickly promoted the rapid development of the domestic smartphone industry. Since then, whenever a technology product needs to be quickly popularized to consumers, people will turn their attention to Xiaomi, "it can bring similar products at a cheaper price."

Just like the newly launched Xiaomi notebook, the market had high expectations and calls for it. Before its release, the Baidu search volume had reached 5.92 million, and there were nearly 700,000 related articles.

As we all know, the current domestic PC market has become a red ocean, with sales declining year after year. Under such circumstances, Xiaomi launched notebooks and was naturally once again regarded as the "savior".

It has a similar appearance to Apple MacBook, a thin and light body, and balanced performance, but the price is only 3,000 to 4,000 RMB. But if you look closely at the configuration of this notebook, it is actually nothing special. At this price, it is not difficult to buy 8G memory, i5 low voltage, solid state drive, and 940MX.

But it’s hard to buy all these configurations at the same price, not to mention that it also has bonus points such as fast charging and expandable memory.

Only Xiaomi can achieve balanced performance and offer the lowest price in the industry.

Although several major bonus factors that once helped Xiaomi achieve rapid success in the short term have now faded or are fading, Xiaomi is still a key symbol in the Chinese Internet market.

It can be said that without Xiaomi, the popularization of smartphones in China would be delayed. Without Xiaomi, there would be no hunger marketing. Without Xiaomi, there would be no windfall theory. Without Xiaomi, China's Internet industry would lack a lot of topics to talk about.

"Before I started Xiaomi, I studied Japanese industry carefully. The improvement of Japanese industry and consumer electronics was actually driven by Sony in the 1970s and Samsung in the 1980s. If we persist for ten or twenty years in the future, when people look back, they will definitely think that Xiaomi has driven the entire Chinese industry. I hope that what we do at Xiaomi can help everyone, help the Chinese industry, and help every consumer." This is Lei Jun's ambition.

If he can do it, then China cannot do without Xiaomi.

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.