Lei Jun: Half a lifetime to catch up with Jobs, and now he is facing Musk.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Tech Planet” (ID: tech618), Author: Tech planet.
It has been rumored that the car was built by Xiaomi, which has been repeatedly denied. Finally, with an announcement from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the boots fell on the ground.
Yesterday, Xiaomi announced that it would invest 10 billion US dollars to build a car. At the Xiaomi spring new product launch that night, Lei Jun spent nearly half an hour telling his new story about building a car with Xiaomi.
“I decided to lead the team myself. This is the last major entrepreneurial project in my life. I know what it means to make a decision. I am willing to put on all the achievements and reputation accumulated in my life to fight for Xiaomi.”
Lei Jun also posted a photo of him and Tesla founder Musk in 2013, and then said that he had visited Musk twice and became the owner of Tesla.
“After seven or eight years, he invested in ten electric car companies.”
Among these ten companies, two are Weilai and Xiaopeng, who are the “four little dragons of car-making” in China. As early as 2015 and 2016, Lei Jun founded Shunwei Capital and successively invested in Weilai Automobile and Xiaopeng Automobile. Although Lei Jun held less than 5% of the shares at the time of the listing of the two companies, in Xiaopeng’s US$400 million Series C financing, Xiaomi invested 50 million through its Fast Pace Limited company registered in the British Virgin Islands. US dollars. Interestingly, the rumor that Weilai’s market value of 100 billion US dollars later surpassed Xiaomi.
Although I am very interested in electric vehicles, the industry is also popular, but “electric vehicles, whether to do or not, is a question.” Although more than 200 patents have been published, such as cruise control, Xiaomi mobile phone NFC car key and so on. Lei Jun and Xiaomi hesitated several times.
As we all know, automobile is the most complicated industry involving the upstream and downstream industry chain, and it is also a project that burns money. “Ten billion investment can only be effective in three to five years.”
But the opportunities of the new car era are also in sight. Lei Jun said, “In the past 75 days, we have had 85 industry visits and communication, four in-depth management seminars, and two formal board of directors.”
Lei Jun said that Xiaomi has a research and development team of more than 10,000 people, has a steady growth of the world’s third mobile phone business, has the best smart ecology, and has a cash reserve of 108 billion yuan. In other words, Xiaomi is ready for the two pillars of making electric vehicles, technology and capital.
According to the current information, Xiaomi will build the car wholly, and all the money will be paid by itself. Some insiders also pointed out that Xiaomi will have a high probability of financing the automobile company separately in the future.
“Xiaomi has accumulated a little bit today, and it is time for us to do a great job.” Lei Jun, who arrogantly blocked all the honors in his life, officially opened his last major business venture in his life.
Looking back on the course of Xiaomi in the past 11 years, Xiaomi has created a fantasy journey from zero to the top three mobile phone manufacturers in the world. The “user thinking”, “product thinking” and other successful methods polished by Lei Jun and his management team have been successfully applied in new power companies such as Weilai, and even “user learning” has evolved in Weilai. Wei Lai teaches”.
Xiaomi has many ways to succeed, but according to customers, there have been three major pits in the development of Xiaomi’s mobile phones. Lei Jun needs to avoid stepping on the pits in the process of leading the car.
The price/performance ratio is not advisable, and there is no low-end new car
This time Xiaomi announced to build a car, netizens commented, “The first car of young people is here” and “19,999 yuan, Xiaomi’s new car will go home.” It can be seen that the public already has an inherent understanding of Xiaomi, that is, the ultimate price-performance ratio.
Extreme price-performance ratio was once the killer of Xiaomi. In October 2011, the Xiaomi M1 smart phone turned out to be a low price of 1999 yuan, which instantly triggered a rush to buy, and since then, a special product called F code was launched. But in 2020, with the phrase “those who win the silk win the world”, Lei Jun angered the vice president of Qinghe University, and Xiaomi’s urgent high-end mood can be seen.
At this Xiaomi’s New Year conference, Lei Jun released two mobile phones, Mi 11 Pro and Mi 11 Ultra, which were named “Android King” and “Android Light” respectively, but they were sold at a high price of up to 7,000 yuan. Whether consumers buy is the final approval. It can be said that the road to high-end Xiaomi mobile phones is still uncertain. After all, after the withdrawal of Huawei mobile phones, models such as iPhone 12, OPPO Find X3 and OnePlus 9 Pro still have strong competitiveness.
Different from Xiaomi’s mobile phones opening the door to the smart phone era with the ultimate price-performance ratio, new domestic carmakers have basically chosen high-end positioning to enter the market. The price of the main model is basically more than 300,000, which is slightly higher than the price of Audi A6 and BMW i3.
Organize according to public quotations
The most typical one is Weilai. The guide price of the first model ES8 is 46.80-624,000 yuan. Not only is the model price high, it costs 30 million yuan to hold the first press conference and rents an exhibition hall with an annual rent of 8 million yuan in Beijing. With VIP-like services throughout the life cycle of users, Li Bin strives to advertise to the market that NIO is the domestic BBA among the new car forces.
Among the three outstanding new cars, only Ideal has ever built a low-speed electric vehicle SEV with a price of only 50,000. In February 2018, Li Xiang announced the closure of the SEV project. Since then, the ideal ONE price of the only new model has been mentioned above 300,000.
Xiaomi’s new car project cannot go to the low end. “Wuling Hongguang’s MINI EV sells 30,000 a month, easily defeating the Tesla Model 3. Does anyone think that Wuling is better than Tesla?” Xiaomi’s new car definitely cannot take the cost-effective route. All roads will be suppressed by domestic Tesla. After all, the mass-produced Tesla has sold 500,000 units in 2020, far exceeding the 4.37, 3.26, and 27,000 units of Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng.
At the press conference on the 30th, Lei Jun also mentioned that “high-quality new cars” would be built, which seemed to imply that Xiaomi’s new cars would take the high-end route. Unlike mobile phones, battery swap services and high-end interiors can all become high-end support for Xiaomi’s new cars. Lei Jun can multi-dimensionally upgrade the pricing service of Xiaomi’s new car.
Hardware is wrong, intelligence is more important than car
Xiaomi’s early mobile phones focused on hardware configuration, and each generation of flagship phones emphasized top configuration and performance fever. In the early days, Xiaomi mobile phones were not very active in industrial design, and claimed that “no design is the best design”, but the hardware performance must be the best. In the era of Android game competition that many people remember, Xiaomi phones have also won many times. Laurels.
I pay too much attention to hardware competition, and MIUI and Mi Talk’s triathlon are not very successful. The Internet business accounts for only about 10% of Xiaomi. The outside world has always positioned Xiaomi as a hardware company. Therefore, Xiaomi’s share price in Hong Kong stocks fell below the issue price for 22 months. It was not until December 28, 2020, after the release of Xiaomi 11, that Xiaomi’s share price rose to 33.75 Hong Kong dollars, nearly twice the issue price, completing Lei Jun When Xiaomi went public, it fulfilled its promise to make investors who bought at that time earn twice.
With the rise of new car power, hardware performance is certainly important, but more of its selling point lies in intelligence.
The so-called “smart car”, in addition to being equipped with advanced technology and capable of information interconnection, the most important thing is to have partial or complete autonomous driving functions. It is necessary to know that the intelligent network technology may be expected to reshape the industry’s profit chain.
According to Morgan Stanley’s recent analysis, Tesla’s FSD fully autonomous driving function will account for one-third of its market value, and the proportion of automotive electronics has become one of the highest cost-value components of Model 3, second only to power. And battery systems, CICC believes that NIO’s automotive software will occupy its marketOne-half of the value.
Take the Tesla Model 3 as an example. The whole system is equipped with L2 level automatic driving, full-speed adaptive cruise, lane keeping assist and other functions as standard, and can also be equipped with L3 level automatic driving, driving road traffic sign recognition, automatic Park in place.
Xiaopeng, known as the most domestically produced Tesla, has also embarked on the road of smart driving. Recently, it has completed the 3000-km expedition from Guangzhou to Beijing by using the NGP function. The assisted driving of Peng P7 is not lagging behind.
Baidu, which has been deploying autonomous driving for 7 years, is a force that cannot be underestimated. Although it has only bet on building cars this year, Baidu Apollo is not only the only autonomous driving technology company in China that can compete with Google Waymo, but also The only technology Internet company in BATHM with L4 autonomous driving Robotaxi on the road.
According to its previous positioning, Xiaomi is a hardware company, and its profits need Internet services to boost its profits. Therefore, in order to build cars, if a group of “new car-building forces” is to break the siege, Xiaomi Still may not choose to use technology to benchmark other car companies, but use software services to open up a new entry.
However, Xiaomi currently does not have a particularly deep accumulation of smart driving.
According to a statistics from AutoLab, NIO has the largest number of car-related patents, reaching 3939. Tesla has 2008 car-related patents worldwide. Only Baidu can compete with new car power in BATHM. The brands are tied, and Xiaomi has only one patent related to autonomous driving.
Organize based on public information
However, it is worth mentioning that Xiaomi invested in the autonomous driving startup Momenta, which has a complete solution from assisted driving to autonomous driving. It remains to be seen whether the subsequent mergers and acquisitions will use technical services.
Building a car is not a one-off sale, and it can bring to the car owner laterThe sense of experience is more important. Because smart cars are the fourth largest smart scene after smart homes, smart offices, and smart factories. Weilai has a worry-free service package with a monthly price of 1,000 yuan. Tesla also has OTA acceleration, battery life upgrades, and FSD (fully autonomous driving). Ability), advanced connection services (online cinema, karaoke) and other intelligent upgrade services.
“Let everyone enjoy the fun of technology”, this is the original purpose of Xiaomi to win the market, and it is also the reason why Xiaomi can win the market. However, it is the homework that Xiaomi needs to solve before it enters the world of “new car”, how to switch to the thinking of giving priority to intelligent services.
No core technology, no future, ability is status
Huawei’s mobile phone can beat Samsung in the domestic market, and Apple’s confidence is undoubtedly because of its core technical capabilities such as chip design. On the other hand, Xiaomi, because of the troubled brotherhood with Qualcomm and the fact that surging chip investment is too large, Xiaomi’s determination to self-supply chips has been insufficient. Moreover, it has never encountered Huawei’s experience in banning Google GMS in overseas markets, and Xiaomi has not had the ambition to develop a mobile operating system.
The lack of core technical capabilities once made the highlights of Xiaomi’s mobile phones not prominent enough, and it was lost in a lot of Android phones. Lei Jun is also very distressed about this. In an interview in 2019, Lei Jun said in a puzzled way: “I don’t know why it is called no technology to make a complete machine. Is it necessary to have an engine to make a car? Things other than engines are not called Is the technology available?”
At present, more than 100 companies have poured into the “new car” field. If Xiaomi continues to have no core technical capabilities for car manufacturing, even if Xiaomi’s vehicle design capabilities are strong, it will still lack core highlights in the eyes of users. By then, high-end The phenomenon that the market is difficult to break through will still exist.
For new energy vehicles, the core technologies mainly refer to batteries, motors, and electronic control, which are commonly referred to as the “three-electric” system. In fact, technologies such as autonomous driving chips, intelligent network connection systems, and super charging technology are all very core. The reason why Tesla is able to excel in the field of new car-making forces is that it has self-developed most of the core technologies.
Tesla self-developed technology
Li Bin, the founder of Weilai Automobile, once said bluntly that the technology of autonomous driving chips is not difficult, and it is easier than mobile phone chips. But recently, Weilai announced that due to the shortage of chips, the company decided to suspend production of 5 at the Hefei Jianghuai Weilai manufacturing plant from March 29, 2021.Working day. According to industry speculation, the shortage of NIO may be in-vehicle MCU chips and IGBT chips with lower technology levels than autonomous driving chips.
Having core technical capabilities such as self-developed chips not only means being able to withstand various black swan incidents and avoid being forced to stop production. More importantly, the ability to control industry pricing power is in their own hands.
At present, Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng also have some technological innovations, but Tesla has launched a price war against the domestic “new forces” with the advantages of self-developed core technology + super factory. Despite the frequent price cuts by consumers for cutting leeks, Tesla Model Y immediately triggered a panic buying on the whole network as soon as it went on the market, causing the official website to paralyze, which is enough to show that “not reducing the price is a choice, but the ability to reduce the price is the ability.”
Xiaomi needs to have this ability to build cars in order to avoid being blocked by a group of new car-building forces that already have the first-mover advantage.
For car building, Lei Jun said frankly that he and Xiaomi have done enough research. Now the industry is still puzzled by the fact that Xiaomi, which started a little late to build a car, can invest 10 billion yuan in the first phase to support its high-end, intelligent research and development, and conquer the core technology of the new car?
According to the 2020 annual report released by Evergrande on March 25, this issue may give you a glimpse of it. According to the Evergrande Automobile Performance Conference, Evergrande has invested a total of 47.4 billion yuan in vehicle manufacturing since 2019, and has invested 24.9 billion yuan in vehicle R&D and design, power batteries, autonomous driving, and intelligent networking.
The fund “ammunition” that Xiaomi has prepared for car building is not particularly abundant. It remains to be seen how Lei Jun, who is determined to “gamble on everything” to build a car, can change the new car industry.