Xiaomi's market value has evaporated nearly 70 %. Does Lei Jun still have money to build a car?

Liu Yuzheng, the world's Internet merchant

Editor Wu Lingwei

For a year, it is enough to let a company experience the chill from the peak.

On August 10, 2021, Lei Jun was at a loss in his second annual speech. At that time, Xiaomi had just surpassed the older brother Apple and seized the first throne of the global market share. He made his goal: it will take the world's first in the world in three years.

But by this year's annual speech, Lei Jun no longer talked about dreams and goals, but shared the story when he fell to the bottom of the valley. He also cooked chicken soup on the spot- "All the setbacks and failures you experience will become the most precious wealth."

One of the reasons may be that Xiaomi fell from the peak in 2022. On August 19, Xiaomi released a financial report in the second quarter of 2022. The data shows that Xiaomi revenue in the second quarter of 70.17 billion yuan, and its net profit after adjustment was 2.08 billion yuan, a year -on -year decrease of 67.1%. In addition, according to IDC data, Xiaomi shipped in the first half of 2022 to third third, a decrease of 25.5%, which was equivalent to selling nearly 25 million mobile phones to sell the largest mobile phone manufacturer on the list.

If it is just a short decline in the consumer electronics business, Lei Jun, who is in a hundred battles, may not be so uncomfortable. But last year, Lei Jun decided to "bet on all the reputation of life and fight for Xiaomi Automobile." This means that while guarding the mobile phone base camp, Xiaomi has to take out huge amounts of funds for cars. The financial report shows that the cost of Xiaomi in the car in the second quarter was 611 million yuan, and the automobile business cost of the automobile business exceeded 1 billion in half a year.

Lei Jun originally planned to fill the vacancy of the car manufacturing with a fully $ 10 billion foundation of 10 billion US dollars.

Time is urgent, the backyard of the mobile phone business has lost fire, and the car business is under pressure. This time, Lei Jun has no time to heal himself through bubble Budi and listening to rock music. In the end, Xiaomi successfully squeezed into the car circle by using a mobile phone, or because of the bottomless hole in the vehicle, it can be seen in the next two or three years.

The industry is top, and the mobile phone business is big decline

In 2021, Lei Jun's decision to make "last entrepreneurship in life" was not arrogant.

The growth of the mobile phone business gave Lei Jun's sufficient confidence. On January 1, 2021, Xiaomi Mi 11 officially started sales. The 5 -minute omni -channel sales exceeded 1.8 billion yuan, setting a historical record; 1 ⽉ 6 ⽇, Xiaomi Group set a new stock price of HK $ 35.9, and the market value once exceeded 900 billion Hong Kong dollars.

Xiaomi also had sufficient ammunition at that time. Li Bin, chairman of Weilai Automobile, has made a famous assertion: Do not build a car without 20 billion yuan. As of the end of 2020, Xiaomi's cash reserves reached 108 billion yuan, spending tens of billions of vehicles, which was not a big injury for Xiaomi.

Therefore, Lei Jun, who was interested in, set two targets in 2021: the first electric vehicle was created in three years, and the first electric vehicle was created in 2024.

However, the global environment has changed sharply in 2022, and Xiaomi's situation is different. On July 6 this year, the two new models of Xiaomi were released, but Xiaomi did not seem to be high -profile in the past. As of press time, Xiaomi's stock price had fallen to the nearest HK $ 11.24/share, with a market value of 280.5 billion Hong Kong dollars, a 68%from the peak last year.

Wang Xiang, president of Xiaomi Group, said at the conference call on August 19 that the decline in the second quarter's performance was mainly due to global inflation and the repeated domestic epidemic, which caused weak consumption. In order to boost consumption, the price reduction of Xiaomi during the 618 major promotion has led to a decline in profits.

The global mobile phone market has gradually become a fact. Starting from the iPhone 4, the smartphone industry has developed for 12 years, and the industry has entered the Red Sea period. According to data from market research agencies Canalys, global smartphone shipments in the second quarter of this year fell 9%to 287 million units year -on -year.

The epidemic is repeated, and the Chinese mobile phone market also seems weak. According to data from China Xintong Institute, the domestic smartphone shipments have fallen to the level 7 years ago. IDC said that in the second quarter of 2022, in addition to Apple's sales slightly increased by 0.1%in the second quarter of 2022, vivo, OPPO, and Xiaomi fell across the board.

Xiaomi ’s Cyclonus in 2021 mainly originated from Huawei mobile phones withdraw from the global market before, and Xiaomi briefly took over some high -end markets. As the consumer's budget shrinks, Xiaomi fell again. The financial report shows that starting in the third quarter of 2020, the average price of Xiaomi mobile phones has risen all the way, but the first decline in the second quarter of this year was returned to the level last year.

Xiaomi's mobile phone business may not be able to return to the rapid rise in a short time. The only surviving blue ocean market is only in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and other countries. Zhang Xiang said at the telephone meeting that Xiaomi's market share and shipments in Chile, Columbia and other markets were increasing. But for Xiaomi, these markets are far less enough to support the future development of Xiaomi's behemoth.

The rest is to go to the middle and low -end market to fight, and at the same time, it is hoped that the domestic consumption power will rise as soon as possible. It is only the bottom of the market in the second quarter, and no one can give a conclusion at present.

Lei Jun's car building logic

The bullets of the car building have been built, and even if the profit is gradually slowing, the car that should be built must continue.

75 days of 85 visits, more than 200 people in the automotive industry, 4 management internal seminars, and 2 official board of directors. This is what Lei Jun once said. Before the official official announcement, Xiaomi visited the entire automotive industry. On March 30, 2021, Xiaomi officially announced its entry into the electric vehicle industry. At that time, Lei Jun said that Xiaomi will invest a cumulative 10 billion US dollars in the next ten years, and the first phase will invest 10 billion yuan.

In the new book "Xiaomi Entrepreneurship Thinking" published in August, Lei Jun explained in detail the logic of Xiaomi cars: except for the huge blue ocean market of smart electric vehicles, the threshold of the electric era has been greatly reduced, and 30,000 components are highly modular. The essence of electric vehicles is already a "consumer electronics" product.

The biggest difference between electric vehicles and traditional fuel vehicles is that fuel vehicles are clear hardware combinations. There is no connection between the hardware provided by different suppliers. The car is just a mechanical product. The electric vehicle has a more advanced electronic and electronic architecture, and finally achieves all units on a computer control vehicle, so that the data generated by each hardware can be implemented unified interactive execution. Car companies can implement different functions through different algorithms, that is, "software definition cars".

The hardware tends to be the same, and the automotive companies realize the intelligent differences through the software algorithm -this is like a large mobile phone?

Lei Jun said that if electric vehicles will "consumer electronics", it also means that it will follow the laws of the consumer electronics industry: the industry enters the mature period after 15 to 20 years, and the top 5 brands in the world will hold more than 80%of the share. Essence In other words, it is meaningful to enter the first five of the industry and ship 10 million units an annual shipment.

This will be extremely cruel competition. And Lei Jun listed Xiaomi's significant advantage in this area: Xiaomi has a deep understanding of the hardware -based Internet service model, Xiaomi has the richest software and hardware fusion experience in the industry, and Xiaomi has a large number of key technical accumulation to reuse.

Another reason is that Lei Jun believes that electric vehicles will be an indispensable link for the intelligent ecology. Together with the mobile phone and home environment, a complete intelligent life scene is formed.

This idea is actually consistent with Lei Jun's mobile phone X AIOT (artificial intelligence Internet of Things). According to the financial report, as of June 30, the number of Xiaomi's IoT devices reached 526 million, an increase of 40.7%year -on -year. At the same time, domestic air -conditioning and refrigerators such as air -conditioning and refrigerators also achieved solid growth.

These smart home devices can bring a smart life experience. But a smart electric vehicle can give it far more than that. A new person in charge of a domestic car building forces told the "World Commerce" that the car will become the same smart terminal and IoT entrance as the mobile phone. The Internet of Things nodes have also doubled, and any camera, cockpit, and audio in the car can be the entrance of the Internet of Things.

This brings great improvement of imagination. If the mobile phones and cars are turned on from the bottom layer, it means that the platform of the mobile phone is expanded unprecedentedly. The person in charge said that the current role of the car's intelligent terminal has just started. "When the iPhone4 comes out, there are a total of more than a dozen APPs, and now there are more than 2,000. What applications are made, car companies do not know. But once a particularly smart person develops a super app like WeChat on the platform, then you immediately lie down and make money. "

Apple is a car, Weilai and Geely make mobile phones. These technology companies enter each other's territory, and they actually adhere to similar ideas. In the face of giants such as Apple's dimension reduction in the future, Xiaomi has to respond in advance.

Keep humility, but to enter the first camp of autonomous driving?

Back to the car building project, on August 11, 2022, on the occasion of Xiaomi 500 days, Lei Jun announced the latest developments: At present, Xiaomi has established a R & D team of more than 500 people and focused on the full stack of autonomous driving technology. R & D, the goal is to enter the first autonomous driving camp in 2024. According to the financial report, the group plans to invest 3.3 billion yuan in the previous period of the first phase of the self -driving research and development.

Xiaomi is very forward -looking and "masochist" from the biggest pit of electric vehicles -autonomous driving. This pit is still struggling with Google, Baidu and other giants.

In August 2021, Xiaomi acquired deep -moving technology of autonomous driving startups with a wholly -owned capital of 500 million. Xiaomi Group said at the time that Shen Dynamic Technology focused on full -stack software solutions for high -level auxiliary driving systems and perception, positioning, planning and control and other full stack software solutions. Essence Obviously, the R & D R & D of the autonomous driving full stack of Lei Jun is largely established on the basis of Shenzhen Dynamic Technology.

In the speech on August 11, Xiaomi publicly publicly publicly drove the capacity of autonomous driving. The test vehicle equipped with Xiaomi autonomous driving algorithm has achieved common scenes such as overtaking, no protection left, automatic driving in ramps, and one -click calls. It can be seen from the video that the Xiaomi autonomous driving algorithm is still in a relatively conservative stage, such as the distance from the car and the brakes. In addition, Xiaomi's video is fine but there are editing and rendering traces, which are different from the rough and mirror display in the automotive industry.

For autonomous driving, "it will be able to use" and drive like an old driver, there is a huge intergenerational difference in the middle. There is no "standing on the shoulders of the giant" here. The autonomous driving algorithm needs a large amount of data support. Compared with the pioneers, six years later, they really lost six years. In an interview with "Late AUTO", Ye Hangjun, the person in charge of Xiaomi Autonomous Driver, is frank and has an absolute advantage in the company that has been mass -produced in data. "The later you enter the game, the more resources you need to prepare. You are indispensable, and you have to accelerate at the same time, because others have gone for a while. "

According to late reports, there are currently 40 autonomous driving test vehicles of Xiaomi, and it is planned to increase to 140 units by the end of the year. In contrast, Baidu Apollo has more than 500 test vehicles. According to media reports, the driving data collected by Tras AUTOPILOT has far exceeded one billion kilometers.

In the new book "Thinking of Xiaomi Entrepreneurship", Lei Jun emphasized the mentality of building a car: it is necessary to prevent all blind optimism and arrogance, maintain alertness, humility, and even maintain the fear of survival. But in 2024, the goal of the first echelon of the autonomous driving is not grand.

Lei Jun also emphasized the key promotion factor of Xiaomi cars in the new book: fan foundation. A fan said to Lei Jun, "If you dare to make it, I will buy it." "Xiaomi has tens of millions of loyal fans and users in China. As long as 1%of them are willing to give us a chance, Xiaomi cars can get a dreamy start."

Even the global king BYD spent nearly 20 years before reaching an annual sales of 1 million expected. For Xiaomi, the purchase of fans is a matter of the car. Before that, it was far less time and a steady stream of cash flow, which was the problem that Lei Jun really wanted to face.

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