Xiaomi's core problem is the insufficient mapping of existing brand minds of offline channels.
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The author | Shen Yuan
Edited | Lin Haifeng
Xiaomi's 2021, on the surface, is to get up early, catch a late set, watch the glory resurrection, and steal the cake that was originally their own. In fact, not always, Xiaomi's 2021, the root is still competing with themselves, or making up lessons, or starting from online, in the way of new retail, xiaomi network and these self-operated users of youpin online and offline integration, or around their own basic disk in the cultivation, in reinforcement.
This is also enough to explain why Xiaomi's market share, especially in China, has increased compared with 2021 and 2020, but there has been no substantial increase.
Taking sub-brands such as POC or CC to take greater efforts than Redmi to acquire and activate old brands, and directly involved in the offline positive market dominated by the exchange of interests between agents and operators is Xiaomi's only trick to re-cut the cake in the Chinese mobile phone market. In a definite market, it is actually the most effective to treat others in the same way as they are. Just like the glory of the year to Xiaomi pixel-level imitation, oneplug to Apple's tribute.
Below is our look back at Xiaomi in 2021 and the ins and outs of the past.
1
"Even if there is a yellow product, it is not spared"
One day at the end of 2019, Liu De, senior vice president and director of xiaomi's organization department, found Gao Ziguang, who was in charge of Xiaomi's e-commerce business at the time, and told him an important news about his job change: he had been selected by the organization department to rotate him to China and be responsible for the new retail business.
This is not an easy appointment.
In fact, before making this decision, as the person in charge of xiaomi's selection of cadres above the middle level, Liu De conducted a screening of important post-80s cadres in the company at that time, and the key objects of inspection included the general managers of ten business departments appointed by Xiaomi after the listing in September 2018, who have joined Xiaomi for many years - among them, Qu Heng, Li Weixing and even the founding employees of Xiaomi who ranked in the top fifteen and drank porridge together.
Relatively speaking, Gao Ziguang joined Xiaomi later, specifically in February 2014. But Gao is also an old man in the industry, who has ten years of Tencent work experience before, after joining Xiaomi, he made IoT flourish, and later went to be responsible for building Youpin e-commerce, which was also able to be appointed as the general manager of Youpin in the adjustment in September 2018 and reported directly to Lei Jun. As a result, Gao Ziguang, who is also a post-80s, has also entered the screening range of Liu De.
Of course, promoting young people within the Xiaomi organization has always been a matter that Lei Jun attaches importance to, and it is also the core work of the organization department under Liu De's management, with the purpose of promoting the rejuvenation of the Xiaomi management team and allowing Xiaomi to maintain its combat effectiveness.
In addition, according to people familiar with the matter, another consideration factor for Lei Jun in this promotion is to prove to the outside world that Xiaomi can also cultivate independent talents, breaking the outside world's view of his "only trust in the old Jinshan people" - in the end, Liu De, after screening a circle, told Lei Jun that only Gao Ziguang was suitable.
However, gao Ziguang was not very excited to hear the news of his promotion; on the contrary, he was hesitant and repeatedly said that he did not want to take it.
Why does Gao Ziguang think so?
On the one hand, he single-handedly founded and was responsible for Youpin e-commerce for more than two years, which has achieved small success, and he has also built a set of effective methodologies and systems under the Youpin e-commerce system, and Youpin has also achieved a GMV breakthrough of 10 billion in 2019. Gao Ziguang believes that there is a product when it is fashionable and unstable, and once it leaves, the direction of youpin's progress changes slightly, and it is easy to cause problems.
On the other hand, despite more than ten years of experience, Gao Ziguang knows that interlacing is like a mountain, his strengths are in software, Internet technology, etc., and the mobile phone industry has high cognitive barriers, which needs to be supported by a lot of experience and contacts, so he does not have much confidence in going to China.
However, soon, Gao Ziguang's doubts were dispelled by Lei Jun's words.
Lei Jun told Gao Ziguang that although youpin e-commerce is developing rapidly and has made some achievements, but Xiaomi China is surrounded by strong enemies and is in danger; therefore, for Lei Jun, he selects the most suitable person to try to change the status quo in China, if it must be at the cost of youhuang, it is also at all costs - after all, mobile phones are Xiaomi's core business.
In fact, at that point in time, Xiaomi China was indeed very dangerous, especially the mobile phone business.
Specifically, in the second half of 2019, Huawei, which was included in the entity list, continued to exert its strength in the domestic mobile phone market after gradually losing overseas markets, and the momentum was very fierce; making its shipments in the Chinese smartphone market in 2019 Q3 increase by 66% year-on-year, accounting for 42.4%, which made the OVM unhappy.
Xiaomi, in particular, saw a 33% year-on-year decrease in Q3 shipments and a market share of only 9.0%.
Not only that, during the 2019 Double Eleven period, Xiaomi China suffered a very ugly defeat in mobile phone sales, and the opponent Glory won the mobile phone sales champion of the day on major e-commerce platforms under the fierce attack.
You know, Xiaomi's heavy dependence on online channels in mobile phone sales has made Xiaomi have always regarded Double 11 as its home field, and it has been the double eleven mobile phone sales champion for a long time before 2018; but this home defeat means that Xiaomi's online basic disk has also been shaken - the result is that Xiaomi's shipments in 2019 Q4 fell by 14%, ranking fifth, even lower than Apple; this is indeed a disastrous achievement.
Therefore, at the end of November 2019, Lei Jun put Lu Weibing, who has more experience in the mobile phone industry, in the position of president of China, and at the same time began a new round of consolidation in China.
Of course, considering the poor results of Xiaomi Double 11, after Lu Weibing took office, there was enough motivation to choose a person in charge of e-commerce business with more rich experience and online trading experience, who was later proved to be Wang Xiaoyan. Zhu Lei, who previously served as vice president of China and was responsible for online trading, was sent to another core position in charge of Xiaomi China, the head of sales operations.
However, after the personnel change, the deep-seated problem that Xiaomi China really has to solve is actually how to spend a lot of effort to make up for offline classes, and how to deeply open up online and offline. On this issue, the prescription given by Xiaomi, that is, the "new retail" that Lei Jun has previously proposed - of course, in this dimension, the new retail business needs a "new person" who is more energetic and more eager to prove himself to assume this role.
From the perspective of Lei Jun and Liu De, Gao Ziguang is indeed a candidate worthy of key consideration. After all, he has joined Xiaomi for more than 5 years, led Youpin to achieve 10 billion GMV, and has made achievements in battle; he is in the golden career period of thirty-seven or eight years old, born on the Internet, and has enough technical and e-commerce background.
In this case, Gao Ziguang became the "most suitable person" that Lei Jun said could help Lu Weibing reorganize his new retail business in China.
And Gao Ziguang, after listening to Lei Jun's ideas about the crisis in Xiaomi China and the quality of e-commerce, finally decided to pluck up the courage to take a step forward and accept this Promising China Offer - after all, from a good point of view, Xiaomi also gave him a promotion, and also gave "the first post-80s executive trained by Xiaomi" a bright name.
As a result, Gao Ziguang came to China and ushered in the biggest challenge of his career.
2
Retail Connect became the breaking point
Xiaomi China is not a good place.
It is one of the two core departments that Lei Jun himself has personally been responsible for as the executive chairman, and it is also one of the "thighs" of the entire business model of Xiaomi - it is the same as the importance of Xiaomi's mobile phone department, once there is a big problem, it will make Xiaomi difficult to move.
But the problem is that Xiaomi China is indeed a lot of problems, and the problems are multi-level.
First of all, from the perspective of Xiaomi's overall business model, after the Chinese mobile phone market enters the era of stock competition, it has to face a core problem of how to sell Xiaomi mobile phones and other products that have been labeled as "cost-effective" efficiently, and how to obtain customers from other mobile phone manufacturers and sell them to a larger user group - this problem can be said to be Xiaomi's "Achilles heel" in the overall business development of mobile phones.
And China is the first major sector of Xiaomi's "Achilles Heel".
Second, Xiaomi has been struggling with the quagmire of sales channels for many years, which involves a large number of complicated internal disputes, entanglements of interests and personnel turmoil. Even after the internal contradictions between Zhu Lei's shelling of Wang Chuan in April 2019 broke out publicly, Lei Jun had to personally serve as the president of the China region to calm the situation.
What is even more fatal is that because it started from online channels, and later began to lay out offline channels - therefore, this increases the difficulty of Xiaomi's offline channels, and thus makes it more difficult to open up online and offline that Xiaomi's "new retail" is committed to.
In fact, the offline and offline contradictions of Xiaomi channels began from the "Wang Lingming era" in 2017.
Specifically, Wang Lingming, who has rich experience in offline mobile phone trading, after serving as vice president of Xiaomi and general manager of the sales and service department (that is, the predecessor of China) in November 2017, shifted the focus of Xiaomi's channels to offline, which was reasonable for Xiaomi at that time - but the ultimate problem was also that he relied too much on offline channels. Some people have summarized the trading style of Xiaomi's successive traders, of which Li Wanqiang is the ultimate explosive online, the keyword is to grab goods, and Wang Lingming is the main offline of massive products, and the keyword is to shop goods. It looks similar, but one is active and one is passive, and the realm is very different.
There is also the fact that xiaomi completed the shipment of 50 million units in 2017, which made xiaomi set a target of 100 million units in 2018, of which 50 million units were domestic and 50 million units overseas. Overseas there are Indian blessings, as well as Southeast Asia, in fact, it is not very difficult, and it belongs to the hell mode at home.
Xiaomi's 50 million units in 2017 have no partitions. In fact, 15 million units have gone overseas through various channels, such as through the Kunming border. At that time, there were even special brushing merchants in Huaqiang North to help Xiaomi mobile phones ship southeast Asia, so Xiaomi actually only had 35 million disks in China.
Wang Lingming naturally expressed opposition, but was suppressed by the CFO Zhou at the time, and the reason was simple, in the summer of 2018, Xiaomi would be listed in Hong Kong. At that time, Wang Lingming and Zhou Shouzi both had a posture of one person below and ten thousand people, but Zhou Shouzi obviously had the upper hand, and Zhou Shouzi, the CFO, was the president-type CFO, which is why Zhou Shouzi transferred from the CFO to become the president of the international department in the next year.
The leak in the house is that the Millet mobile phone department has almost no explosive models before Q3 in 2018, so this year Wang Lingming was forced by the huge pressure of mobile phone shipments, and chose the offline channel to vigorously suppress the goods, resulting in a violent rebound in offline channels, accumulating enough inventory, and causing a major crisis in Xiaomi's sales in the Chinese market at that time.
Before the National Day in 2018, Wang Lingming transferred his post, Xiaomi's sales and service department was reorganized into China, and Wang Chuan served as the chief of staff of the group and the president of China. Wang Chuan's main project during the Trading China period is Redmi Note 7, this mobile phone is a blockbuster product, in the specific trading ideas to choose is online first, offline follow-up strategy, it is accurate to say who can sell goods to the hands of users according to the rules to raise the priority of whom, so one is so, in this year's double 11, Pinduoduo than Jingdong to get more support from Xiaomi, that is to say, not only offline, but also online there are priority adjustments. In a word, don't hoard goods, grab more goods.
Wang Chuan's strategy has its own rationality, but it violates the unspoken rules of the industry. The unspoken rule of manufacturers and agents is that if this product is not easy to sell, the agent helps the manufacturer to resist the task of anti-inventory, but if the next product is easy to sell, then it is necessary to give the agent a certain degree of priority, so that the agent earns enough money during this priority period to make up for the previous deficit.
But Wang Chuan ignored this when he came to power, which touched the interests of many important offline channel agents in Xiaomi at that time - finally in April 2019, a fierce internal conflict of interests and contradictions broke out, the internal Ten Thousand Words Book plus the external four major national representatives collectively forced the palace (Wang Chuan dumped a large amount of inventory in his hands without leaving class), wang Chuan was the president of China, only more than half a year ago.
Xiaomi's online and offline connection is difficult to get through, and even Lei Jun himself, who has since taken over as the president of China, is difficult to handle, and he handed over the burden of China to Lu Weibing, who has more experience in the mobile phone industry after half a year.
At that time, after Lu Weibing operated the China region, he sorted out the Chinese region, and the core sales department was divided into three, of which the sales department was responsible for Gao Ziguang, mainly Xiaomi Network and Xiaomi Home, of course, as well as the Xiaomi product that he had in mind; the second sales department was responsible for Wang Xiaoyan, mainly e-commerce channels; the person in charge of the third sales department was Yu Peng, responsible for the operator business sector. All three of them reported to Lu Weibing at the same time, of which undoubtedly Gao Ziguang's role was the most critical.
Informed sources told Leifeng Network that after Gao Ziguang joined the Chinese region, he "felt very confused for a while" and "did not know how to start", because he really could not find a breakthrough in the development of the "new retail" business; not only that, he was facing an organizational system of thousands of people, which had been operating for many years, and it was very difficult to improve.
Fortunately, after a period of exploration, based on the "new retail" framework proposed by Lei Jun, Lu Weibing put forward a new idea of overall reform in China, in short, to streamline channels, focus on retail, and standardize management - among them, the core of standardized management is digitalization, which has become the core breakthrough of Gao Ziguang's work.
But the biggest dilemma facing the whole thing is that at that time, the retail format in the whole of China was extremely complex, and there were various stores such as KA and provincial packages, and it was very difficult to carry out unified digital management. Fortunately, Lu Weibing is more resolute, the reform of the channel can be described as a drastic axe, and Gao Ziguang has grasped the core channel to do digital exploration and practice, while "other parts are ignored first, and if they can be cut, they will be cut."
In the end, pushed by Lu Weibing and under the specific responsibility of Gao Ziguang, Xiaomi created a tool for digital management of stores in August 2020, which is called Xiaomi Retail Pass. Leifeng Network once saw the Xiaomi Retail Pass demonstrated by Shang Jin himself in the office of Shang Jin, the political commissar of Xiaomi China at the time, how much each store sells every day, how many goods can arrive in a few days, which store circulation is abnormal, these are displayed one by one on the retail pass. This is undoubtedly the industry's most advanced level of digital intelligence management tools, but also Wang Chuan QinTao has been pursuing the effective support of xiaomi product circulation speed on the tool end.
In addition to Xiaomi Retail, the basic premise for realizing the digital management of stores is that Xiaomi's offline stores are standardized, and the so-called "standard" here is Xiaomi Home.
Therefore, behind the operation of this model, it actually means the comprehensive reform of Xiaomi's offline channels: the original four main offline channel business models (Xiaomi franchise stores, Xiaomi authorized stores, Xiaomi stores and Xiaomi home) are reduced to two, that is, opening Xiaomi home brand stores in urban business districts and opening authorized stores in township areas - of course, large-scale expansion of stores is also an important part of this reform.
3
The ideal rate of return for each Xiaomi home is 34%
But to speed up the opening of the store, the first person to convince is Lei Jun.
Xiaomi, which was born as a mobile Internet company at the beginning, has rejected offline channels from the beginning of its business model. After all, offline channels are a very heavy model, not what Lei Jun and his partners who came from software and the Internet are good at, so he is not very much advocating large-scale opening offline stores; and at that time, Xiaomi Home had opened hundreds of stores, and Lei Jun felt that "doing 1,000 stores a year is almost the same."
In the midsummer of 2020, Beijing was hot and Lei Jun was anxious.
One night, Lei Jun couldn't help but call Gao Ziguang and Shang jin, who were in charge of the expansion of offline stores in China at the time, to his office and asked them to talk about it:
Why are so many stores open? Why are those stores that used to lose money now? Why is it that the offline store model that did not work before can be understood in the new model of "retail digitalization"?
In fact, before this conversation, Lu Weibing, as the president of China, had already talked to Lei Jun several times about the necessity of this new model and large-scale store expansion, but Lei Jun was still hesitant after listening to it.
Readers will ask, Gao Ziguang is a current official, who is ShangJin? It is said that Shangjin was an old man of Jinshan, also an assistant to Lei Jun, one of the important pioneers of Jinshan Games, and also the leader of interactive entertainment business including Xiaomi's game business, and many construction and management work of Xiaomi Park is a very important work experience of Shangjin, and it is this experience that makes Shangjin change from a layman in offline business to a professional in site selection and space decoration. Yu is also the leader of large-scale expansion of stores.
That night, Gao Ziguang and Shang Jin were in Lei Jun's office, specifically from the perspective of material cost, gross profit, store cost, turnover efficiency, etc., the feasibility of the retail digital model, and through the strict calculation method of science and engineering, a data was obtained: an offline store model can achieve a gross profit margin of 34% under ideal circumstances.
The rough deduction is as follows: opening a millet home is 2 million, of which 700,000 decoration site selection and other hard costs, the remaining 1.3 million is used to purchase goods from millet, as for personnel management, selected by millet, not to be borne by millet home (millet personnel are more than the sum of OV, more than the number of millet home these tens of thousands of people) . If the products displayed by Xiaomi Home can be turned around, there will be a 3% gross profit return, if it can be turned around once a month, then there will be 34% of the gross profit throughout the year, you can also understand that Xiaomi has issued a financial wealth management product with a maximum return of 34% and semi-guaranteed capital (once withdrawn from the initial purchase of money).
The key here is actually whether you can turn around once a month, mobile phones are difficult to do, but IOT products are possible to do. It is true that with the generalization of the ecological chain and the intensification of competitors, the logic of Xiaomi's IOT products with closed eyes to buy and buy has also encountered challenges, but at present, it is still a higher grade. The development story of the Xiaomi ecological chain and the challenges currently encountered are also interesting, welcome to pay attention to our follow-up article Xiaomi ecological chain five questions.
As the largest category and two-thirds of the revenue plate (the revenue of mobile phones and IOT is about two to one), mobile phones play a more role in drainage. This is very demanding for the mid-to-high-end series of products in Xiaomi mobile phones, especially Xiaomi mobile phones, and this is precisely the focus of Xiaomi in 2021. In this way, a closed loop is formed.
Since Gao Ziguang and Shangjin are not from the background of the mobile phone industry, when they try to explain this model to Lei Jun, they increase their credibility anyway.
According to the party's recollection, Lei Jun's doubts about the expansion of offline stores, a deep-seated reason on the root, is that he is worried about the recurrence of the problem of offline stores that appeared during Wang Lingming's tenure, and the exquisite design of Xiaomi Home and the blessing of retail communication have made the circulation of the entire millet products have been in a transparent and controllable state, even if there is a large-scale store closure, the entire return is also controllable.
In this way, Lei Jun's doubts about the expansion of offline stores were dispelled little by little - this is not easy.
4
The Xiaomi of Wandian qifa does not
Eat the "Huawei Bonus"
It was also at this time that the development of Xiaomi's new retail business in China also ushered in an unexpected and excellent opportunity.
Specifically, after Huawei encountered a new round of sanctions from the United States in May 2020, the manufacturing of HiSilicon chips was restricted, which inevitably affected its mobile phone business and further affected Huawei's offline channel providers. Of course, this time the impact of Huawei channel providers, until September of that year began to play a role, many of the Mobile phones to sell Huawei channel providers, began to turn in a large area, because the OV two offline channels in the development process of many years has long been self-contained, there is no specific personal relationship is difficult to enter, so many inorganic offline channel merchants began to consider millet.
A person familiar with the cooperation between the two sides told Leifeng that at that time, it was indeed a good time for Xiaomi; even at that time, Xiaomi's offline store could be opened, and Xiaomi's retail general energy could be played in it, which also benefited from the sanctions imposed by Huawei at that time.
Of course, for Xiaomi at that time, under such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it would also try its best to seize Huawei's important channel providers. Leifeng Network learned that in this process, Xiaomi even has an assessment index similar to "the proportion of Huawei's important channel providers switching to Millet".
It is under the joint drive of this internal and external factors that on January 9, 2021, Xiaomi ushered in the milestone of "thousands of stores open together" offline, and 1,000 millet homes across the country opened on the same day; in this regard, Lu Weibing commented that this means that Xiaomi has created and verified a new model of offline retail, and also marks that Xiaomi has become a new force in the retail industry. These words are self-justified, but it is undeniable that behind the realization of this milestone, there is no lack of god assistance from Huawei.
In addition to many channel providers of the original Huawei system switching to Xiaomi, many employees of the original Huawei sales system have also joined the sequence of Xiaomi, and they have also become a powerful contact point in the expansion of Xiaomi's offline channels after being tempered by the Huawei system.
In the following 2021, Xiaomi began a crazy store expansion process, reaching 5,000 Xiaomi homes in April, and from March 2021 to June 2021, Xiaomi's offline stores increased by 3,100; at the end of October, this number doubled to 10,000, which is a wild leap forward.
Of course, in order to make such a wild surge, Xiaomi has also used a lot of tricks behind it - one of the effective tricks is subsidies.
A channel owner who opened more than a dozen Xiaomi home stores in a high-tier city told Leifeng Network that in 2021, in order to encourage merchants to open more stores, Xiaomi will give a certain number of additional point subsidies according to the number of stores opened (after all, the gross profit of Xiaomi mobile phones is relatively low), at first it was made up by 0.5 percentage points, and then in the second half of the year, two consecutive months were given 1 point, he stressed that he was a better situation, because the number of stores opened was more than ten; many sellers with a lower level (such as the number of stores opened was less than ten). Not necessarily much to make up.
The boss said that xiaomi's offline expansion is very strong, in order to pursue the speed and quantity of stores, there is actually a significant reduction in the requirements for store location, for example, the customer flow in the past requirements were ten thousand, but in order to quickly open a store, three thousand passenger flow can also be accepted, and then the store opened out - he also gave Leifeng network an example, before he chose the site for xiaomi home, he could not see the storefront, but also joined the channel merchants later to open millet home.
Of course, for channel providers, the rapid expansion of millet offline stores in the number has also led to another problem: that is, the increase in store density will quickly reduce the offline user coverage group of each millet home, resulting in the average business of each store developing in a bad direction.
In other words, the Xiaomi home has opened a lot, and it has also "rolled" up with each other.
From Q1 to Q2 2021, Xiaomi's share of the offline mobile phone sales market has only risen from 7% to 7.8% (for comparison, the share from 2020 Q4 to 2021 Q1 is 4.7% to 7.8%).
This shows that the increase in the number of stores has been significantly reduced in terms of converting into xiaomi's offline mobile phone sales.
At the end of October 2021, Xiaomi Home stores officially broke through 10,000 stores; this means that from the end of April to the end of October, Xiaomi Home opened another 4,500 stores - such a wild surge once again intensified the "inner volume" between Xiaomi Home stores, and eventually inevitably led to losses.
According to the news obtained by Lei Feng from industry insiders, throughout 2021, Xiaomi's offline stores will suffer large losses, and the proportion is not in the minority. However, some senior industry insiders told Leifeng that the loss of newly opened mobile phone stores in the first year is relatively normal, because each store needs to have a process of "raising stores" - so the profit and loss performance of Xiaomi stores in 2022 is more valuable.
It is worth mentioning that from the end of October 2021 to the end of the year, the number of new retail stores in Xiaomi was 10,200, which means that after reaching the target of 10,000, the opening speed of Xiaomi Home has slowed down a lot.
Why?
The first is the problem of product strength. An industry insider who once worked in the xiaomi channel management department told Leifeng that xiaomi's increase in stores in 2021 has objectively played a role in reaching the user group, but this reach is more of Xiaomi's original target user group. But if Xiaomi wants to achieve offline breaking, its product power is very critical - Xiaomi does realize this, and in 2021 to make a big effort to high-end, but it is clear that high-end is not a day's attack, Xiaomi hopes to obtain high-end users in 2021 have been harvested by Apple.
This is also the reason why Lei Jun announced the establishment of a high-end strategy working group at the beginning of 2022.
Secondly, although Xiaomi has opened stores in a big way, it essentially borrows leverage to open direct stores, which still cannot shake the main force of operator channels and traditional offline channels. Although Xiaomi did take over a part of Huawei's storefront, more offline channel providers who used to do Huawei are actually shareholders of Glory with the independence of Huawei, so they have more motivation to help Glory after the return of Glory; of course, Glory has more degrees of channel resources in the field of operators - the sum of the two is the reason why Glory sales can quickly return (on how to quickly return after Glory independence, please pay attention to our follow-up articles).
5
The second war with glory
In the third quarter, Xiaomi ushered in the "second war" with glory. In fact, the glory independent from Huawei, after gradually returning to the blood, began to attack the Chinese market in a large scale, especially the offline channels, because there are a large number of offline channel providers in the shareholders of glory, so the glory returns quickly, offline shipments account for up to 70%, and in store expansion and market share have begun to grab Xiaomi's position - which makes xiaomi uncomfortable.
Under the influence of multiple pressures, Gao Ziguang decided to end his career in Xiaomi China.
For Gao Ziguang, the creation of Xiaomi Retail Pass is an effective way for him to help Xiaomi's offline expansion in China, which is also within his ability range, but in terms of the complex mobile phone channel system, he does not consider himself an expert. Informed sources told Leifeng That after Xiaomi Retail began to open offline stores across the country, Gao Ziguang felt that his mission in China had been basically completed, and he already had the intention of starting a business before the 40-year-old mark.
In September 2021, Gao Ziguang proposed his resignation to Lei Jun, which was approved at the end of the month. In the ensuing appointment, Shang Jin, who previously served as the political commissar of Xiaomi China, began to assume the responsibility of new retail. In addition, Wang Xiaoyan continued to be in charge of the e-commerce department and began to be responsible for the reporting of the sales operation department.
In terms of organizational personnel and structure, Xiaomi China continued to usher in many adjustments in Q4.
In November, Xiaomi announced the integration of its independent e-commerce platform "Xiaomi Youpin" with Xiaomi's retail business in China. In the same month, Xiaomi announced that Liu Yi, vice president of sales of the international department, would be transferred to China as the general manager of the e-commerce department, while the three sales operation departments (one responsible for mobile phones, two responsible for TVs and other home appliances) that were originally divided according to different products were uniformly responsible for Wang Xiaoyan.
On January 28, 2022, Xiaomi China changed again. Specifically, Shang Jin, who had previously succeeded Gao Ziguang in charge of the new retail business, also chose to leave, and Wang Xiaoyan, deputy general manager of China, concurrently served as the general manager of the new retail department and reported to Lu Weibing, president of China - through this adjustment, Wang Xiaoyan was not only responsible for the new retail business, but also responsible for the sales operation in China, which is reasonable.
After all, Wang Xiaoyan was born offline in his early years, and he had been trading online and offline, and he was indeed the most suitable candidate for Lu Weibing in promoting Xiaomi's online and offline channels.
In this way, China has formed the latest triangular pattern dominated by Lu Weibing and wang Xiaoyan and Liu Yi as the right and left arms.
Among them, the position of Liu Yi, vice president of the international department, is intriguing.
What has to be pointed out here is that Xiaomi has been bumpy in the Chinese market in recent years, but the reason why it has been able to overcome dangers in the crisis is largely due to its actions and layout in internationalization.
For example, in Q4 2016, under the offensive of OV offline stores, Xiaomi mobile phones in the Chinese market showed a 40% super sharp decline, simply forced into a dead corner. Fortunately, at this time, Xiaomi has begun to take off in the Indian market and become the first; in 2017, Xiaomi has successively entered the ASEAN countries market represented by Indonesia, the Eastern European market represented by Russia, and the southwest European market represented by Spain, helping Xiaomi achieve a reversal.
Not only that, after the opening of these overseas markets, in the later development process, Xiaomi's international channels have also effectively helped Xiaomi digest some of the goods that the Chinese market cannot go, and it is also conducive to solving some of the problems of pressing goods in the Chinese market - thus, this model is also jokingly called "sewer mode".
Therefore, Xiaomi's international business has been a big contributor to Xiaomi's mobile phone business for a long time before and after Xiaomi's listing - here is an interjection, based on the important role of the International Department at that time, Zhou Shouzi was appointed as the president of Xiaomi International In November 2019 in the personnel adjustment, which is quite guaranteed.
Moreover, when Zhou Shouzi first took office, Xiaomi International Department had another external favorable condition for business development. That is, Huawei was listed in the LIST of US entities in May 2019 and could not use Google services, resulting in a large gap in the overseas market, especially in the European market - at this time, Liu Yi, vice president of Xiaomi's international department, also seized the opportunity, Huawei-born him, learning Huawei's routine and establishing market relations with European operators, so Xiaomi's volume in overseas markets increased, which helped Xiaomi survive its dark years in the Chinese market in the second half of 2019 and early 2020.
However, Zhou Shouzi was not very satisfactory in his appointment in the International Department, he was very hardworking and talented enough, but as an airborne soldier, under the operating system that the International Department had already established at that time, it was indeed very difficult to further and do more; and as a superior, Zhou Shouzi also had to deal with the relationship with Liu Yi, a meritorious minister.
There is a paragraph related to Liu Yi: In the spring of 2021, Zhou Shouzi decided to leave Xiaomi, Liu Yi was the last person in the company to know, Liu Yi was very depressed about this, found Boss Lei to complain about why he was the last person to know, and finally calmed down after Boss Lei asked for a drink.
It is worth noting that shortly after Liu Yi arrived in China, Xiaomi International itself ushered in a large-scale organizational change in December.
Specifically, the focus of this change is to integrate the overseas sales regions divided by region, the international network-wide e-commerce sales department and the operator and business development department divided by channel, and the Indian regional operation department that was not originally not the international business department into the international "sales department", opening up various regions and channels, and the vice president of the international department is responsible for the unified responsibility of Xiang Zheng. Informed sources said that Xiaomi's adjustment is considering the promotion of the "new retail model" with Xiaomi Home as the core in the international market as appropriate.
It can be said that through this series of personnel adjustment appointments, Lu Weibing has initially built the organizational and operational basis of the entire Xiaomi channel system, and its purpose is more clear at a glance: he will take the lead, open up the online and product e-commerce in China, open up the online and offline in China, and open up between the Chinese region and the international department.
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Write at the end
The development of enterprises is often from real to virtual, from virtual to real.
For Xiaomi, the iconic company of China's mobile Internet, although it comes from the background of the Internet and software industries, it has embarked on a real economic road of smart manufacturing almost from the beginning – from smart phones, smart hardware, and now the smart cars that are in a mess.
In other words, xiaomi's core problem is the insufficient mapping of existing brand mentality of offline channels, and one of the voices heard most by Leifeng in the survey writing of this article is that Xiaomi should form its own brand matrix and should establish a 2B-oriented new mobile phone brand as soon as possible to form a positive restriction on Rong OV.
Separating Redmi is a great trick, but Redmi should be more for online channels.
In terms of product definition, Redmi is almost the same but slightly under-equipped configuration but at a lower price than Xiaomi's same product, although it is very clever, but it is more of a stopgap measure. In the final analysis, the product is not enough to make people scream, and the extreme cost-effective route implementation is not resolute enough.
One data is that Xiaomi also gives 10% of the road money to Jingdong, and other brands that are far lower than Xiaomi's potential energy are also this proportion, but in the past, Xiaomi only gave Jingdong a 4-point share. Informed sources said that Xiaomi had hoped to talk with JD.com about the proportion in December, but then JD.com removed Xiaomi's products for spurious reasons, and the two sides finally reconciled, respected each other, shook hands, and in the end, Xiaomi did not have much chips in front of JD. If there are products that continue to scream, Xiaomi can increase the gross profit of at least single digits from the game of JD.com alone.
Xiaomi series products should continue to go to the high-end, continue to do more research and development investment around cutting-edge technology and the next generation of semiconductor materials, enhance Xiaomi's brand image and also drive Xiaomi's appeal offline. This is also the foundation of Xiaomi as a high-tech enterprise.
In fact, for offline channels, Xiaomi has more than once thought of doing independent brands, such as the previous POCO and CC series. But the problem is that the growth of new mobile phone brands needs opportunities and time, and it takes time to be recognized by new user groups; at the same time, it is not realistic for new mobile phone brands to obtain enough resources to support their growth within Xiaomi - after all, the internal volume between Xiaomi and Redmi is serious enough.
There is also a problem, the operator channel has always been a weak channel within Xiaomi that needs to make up lessons. In addition to the lack of external sales, the operator departments in the Xiaomi system are more than one level behind Huawei.
In response to the solution to this problem, industry analysts told Leifeng that Xiaomi can actually consider acquiring some past brands in the Chinese mobile phone market. Of course, Meizu and Xiaomi's original users overlap too much without consideration (Xiaomi is now difficult to bid head-on with Geely), but Gionee, which once overpowered OV in the northern market, and Coolpad, which was once successful in the operator market, can be revived.
The Black Shark phone was also an option. Informed sources told Leifeng Network that in the summer of 2021, Li Wanqiang suddenly found Lei Jun from Shanghai to Beijing and talked about a plan, the core content let Xiaomi sell the shares of the Black Shark team to himself, Xiaomi continued to be the major shareholder, and then he operated to focus on making image mobile phones, this plan has enough time to move, the interests of Xiaomi are greater, the team is more buyin, and there will be strong attention. It is conceivable that if the black shark transforms into an image, the main attack line, coupled with the comeback of Li Wanqiang, what kind of famous scene it will be.
But in the end it didn't become a reality.
There are many theories about this. One theory is that Xiaomi has taken the authorization of a well-known camera at this time, and it is necessary to make an image mobile phone, which is a core resource, and how to price the resource is a problem. Another theory is that because of the promise to Zhou Hongyi, Liu Jiangfeng joined 360 to help him take care of the IOT business department and Boss Lei is like a stranger, and Boss Lei is not willing to be involved with Liu Jiangfeng, so he wants to cut it as soon as possible. There is also a saying that Liu Jiangfeng wanted to turn around to build a car after cashing out from the black shark, so he categorically rejected Ali, more to say, Lei Feng network heard a number of people close to Liu Jiangfeng about the idea of building a car, can only sigh the lack of imagination, can also play like this, provided that Liu Jiangfeng can build the car, but think of Yu Chengdong in Xiaokang, Li Yinan in Niuchuang can build a car, Liu Jiangfeng should also be able to have the organizational ability and strategic resources needed to build a car.
Speaking of which, and then to the story of car building, building a car is really Wang Fried. Under the preview, about the enmity between Xiaomi Car and Wei Xiaoli, we will release a long article recently, so stay tuned.
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