On November 29, 2023, Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, donated 1.3 billion yuan to his alma mater, Wuhan University, in his personal name, which is also the largest personal cash donation from alumni received by a university in China. This week, "Face to Face" interviewed Lei Jun.
In 1987, Lei Jun was admitted to the computer science department of Wuhan University. When he was a student at Wuhan University, Lei Jun won a lot of scholarships, and he basically relied on scholarships and helping teachers do projects to support himself during his four years of college. This time he donated to his alma mater, and Lei Jun positioned it as a trip to repay his wishes.
Lei Jun: Once I got a scholarship with a lot of money, and at the award ceremony, when I stood on the stage, I was thinking, if I have money one day, I will pay it back 100 times or even 10,000 times.
One of the main directions of this donation is the research of the six basic disciplines of mathematics, physics, chemistry, literature, history and philosophy of Wuhan University.
Lei Jun: In the past few years, these basic disciplines have been relatively weak in universities, and applied disciplines may be relatively valued in schools because they are easier to produce results and easier to obtain scientific research funds. We've been in business for more than 30 years, and today, it's actually becoming more and more clear that you want to do something amazing, and you have to be a long-termist. Recently, I have often said within Xiaomi that greatness comes from boiling.
The story of Lei Jun and Xiaomi is not unfamiliar to the public. In the past 13 years, Xiaomi has not only been a technology brand that has penetrated people's lives, but also an electronic product that can always bring surprises in the competition, and a start-up company full of stories.
In the library of Wuhan University, Lei Jun read a book called "The Fire of Silicon Valley" and began to build his lifelong dream, because "The Fire of Silicon Valley" tells the story of Steve Jobs' entrepreneurship. So in the 80s, Jobs was Lei Jun's first idol.
Lei Jun: It is precisely because I know Jobs very well that I feel that I am not a person like Jobs, and I don't think I can be Jobs, but it does not prevent us from making different products in another direction.
With this fire of dreams, Lei Jun embarked on his own entrepreneurial road. In 1991, after graduating from Wuhan University, Lei Jun and his friends founded Kingsoft Company to develop WPS office software to compete with Microsoft's Office office software. An unknown small company against the behemoth Microsoft is destined to fight extremely hard, and Kingsoft once faced the dilemma of "product failure, business collapse, and the company almost shut down". In Jinshan, Lei Jun completed the transformation from a programmer to a business manager, and experienced the process of the enterprise from being in trouble to re-emerging. Personally, the more than 20 years of Jinshan are Lei Jun's youth, and the world, those 20 years are the era when the first wave of the Internet has turned upside down, and Lei Jun has unconsciously passed by this wave. Many years later, Lei Jun issued his famous emotion - "Standing on the tuyere, pigs can fly".
Lei Jun: Because I am an engineer and an entrepreneur who started as a programmer, everything we do is either that I am interested, or that we meet a few users who say that this product and they want such a product, so we decide to set up a project and decide to do it, and rarely consider whether it is a major opportunity point of the times, whether there is the possibility of explosive growth, and think less about it. Therefore, such an enterprise has a strong ability to survive, and it must not be easy to die, but it is not easy to be very large. That's why I came up with the tuyere theory. I think we have to not only bury our heads in pulling cars, but also look up at the road, which is a huge correction for my own business.
In order to catch up with the first wave of the Internet, Lei Jun led people to found Joy.com, which mainly sells books and audio-visual products on the Internet. But at this time, the Internet bubble had burst, e-commerce had not yet risen in full swing, and the financing ability was insufficient, so in September 2004, Lei Jun reluctantly sold Excellence.com to Amazon.
Lei Jun: We should have essentially missed that point in time of the Internet, we are thinking about when the next opportunity is, we already know four or five years in advance that the future opportunity is the mobile Internet, I just don't know what the time point of that outbreak is, so after the release of the iPhone and Android, I think the mobile Internet opportunity will be in full swing.
Faced with the opportunity, Lei Jun chose to start his own business again. On April 6, 2010, in an inconspicuous office in Zhongguancun, Beijing, Lei Jun and more than a dozen colleagues drank a bowl of millet porridge and founded Xiaomi.
Relying on a clear business model and accurate market position, Xiaomi mobile phones were released in 2014 only three years after their release, and they occupied the market position of No. 1 in China and No. 3 in the world. In November of this year, at the first World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Lei Jun made no secret of his high spirits. But in less than 2 years, Xiaomi has encountered the biggest crisis since its founding. The pure online model has fallen into a growth bottleneck, and the sales of Xiaomi mobile phones have declined significantly.
Reporter: In 2016, you also mentioned a description in your speech, saying that this is not a human life, and maybe even cats and dogs can't stand it.
Lei Jun: Because the enterprise is actually in the life and death of the enterprise, the entire mobile phone industry at that time felt that we were dying, so once you feel that you can't do it, all the suppliers may reduce your support, it is an industry that is highly dependent on the industrial chain to survive, if the entire industrial chain does not support you, the entire Xiaomi may close its doors. In that case, I joked with them at the time, I said I don't go to hell, who will go to hell, and I said I would do it myself.
In October 2016, the release of Xiaomi MIX full-screen mobile phone injected hope into Xiaomi in the trough, and also won the respect of Xiaomi in the industry.
2020 marks Xiaomi's 10th anniversary, and in this year, Xiaomi has further established its strategy to become a global leader in a new generation of hard-core technology in the next decade, providing consumers with high-end technology products.
To do high-end technology products, not only need technology accumulation, technical research, but also need to have a high degree of control over the entire industrial chain, in the process of developing Xiaomi's first generation of high-end machines, Lei Jun and the team once opened a military training-style collective life.
Lei Jun: We want to become the best company in the world, and only by unswervingly moving towards the high-end market and unswervingly investing in core technology can we have a chance.
In October 2023, Xiaomi's new generation of high-end machines, the Xiaomi 14 series, was released and went on sale, and the sales volume quickly exceeded one million units.
In terms of mobile phone operating system, Apple has its own iOS system, Huawei has its own HarmonyOS system, and the Xiaomi 14 series is equipped with the "surging OS", which is Xiaomi's own research and development of the "people, cars, home" full ecological operating system. For a long time in the past, Chinese companies have often faced questions from the outside world about "lack of core and soul". The birth of Xiaomi's surging OS marks a breakthrough for Chinese companies in the field of operating systems.
Lei Jun: We have been exploring the operating system since its inception, seven years ago we decided to start doing, more than 5000 engineers have invested, not long ago released Xiaomi surging OS, this time the operating system we positioned the achievement is people-centric.
Become the layout of a hard-core technology company, making car manufacturing an inevitable choice for Xiaomi. Make it yourself, don't merge and acquisition, don't OEM, and work silently on this new track for nearly three years, Xiaomi Auto will be listed next year.
Lei Jun told reporters that he feels that Xiaomi has many natural advantages in making cars, because the essence of today's smart electric vehicles is the integration of the automobile industry and the consumer electronics industry, which is a big integration, so entering the automotive industry is a challenge for Xiaomi, and the difficulty is controllable in general.
Lei Jun: We invested 3,400 engineers in our first car, and the entire R&D investment exceeded 10 billion, and we used more than 10 times the investment. With that in mind, I'm going to do it anyway in a way that I want to get.
In the past six years, Xiaomi's R&D investment has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 38.4%, and it is expected that the total R&D investment will exceed RMB 20 billion in 2023 and RMB 100 billion in the next five years. High-intensity R&D investment has injected strong impetus into the upward growth of millet.
Lei Jun: We feel that there is still a lot of unmet demand in these market areas where Xiaomi is located today, and I think Xiaomi has just begun. On the one hand, we are rooted in the Chinese market, do a good job of internal circulation, and at the same time have a firm confidence in globalization, I think this is the path that Xiaomi has chosen, and there are huge opportunities on this road.
In his 2023 annual speech, Lei Jun officially announced the strategic upgrade of Xiaomi's technology and announced Xiaomi's technology philosophy: choose technology fields with long-term value to human civilization and adhere to long-term continuous investment.
Lei Jun said that the core driving force for Xiaomi's continuous progress and evolution comes from its dreams and goals.
Source: CCTV News
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