DoNews reported on December 18 that in the CCTV "Face to Face" program broadcast on the evening of the 17th, Xiaomi Group founder, chairman and CEO Lei Jun accepted an exclusive interview with a CCTV reporter and talked about the reasons for donating a building to Wuhan University and his entrepreneurial journey. And Xiaomi’s efforts in the automotive field.
According to IT House, Lei Jun said that Xiaomi has many natural advantages in making cars, because today’s smart electric vehicles are essentially the integration of the automotive industry and the consumer electronics industry. "The chairman of a car company told me that a smart electric car is actually a large mobile phone with four wheels. Of course, it is not accurate, but it shows that the two industries are highly integrated." Therefore, in his view, entering The automotive industry "has challenges" but "generally speaking, the difficulty is controllable."
Lei Jun also revealed that three years ago, he thought building a car was quite difficult. After a user survey, he established the principle of "keeping integrity and surprising things": fully respecting the laws of the automotive industry and using mature technologies in the industry to ensure that the first Once the car is ready, we can innovate based on this premise.
Xiaomi’s second strategy is to “invest ten times.” “For example, when a general car company builds a car, it invests about three to four hundred people and R&D expenditures of RMB 1 to 2 billion. However, our first car invested 3,400 engineers. The entire R&D investment exceeded 10 billion."
Lei Jun said that after having such confidence, he started to build (cars) with the approach of "determining to win".
When talking about the expectations for the first car, Lei Jun said that "there are definitely expectations", but the car is indeed very complicated, and he is particularly worried that it will not be popular at first and no one will buy it. "What's even more worrying is that if everyone comes to buy it and has to wait for another year or two, they will definitely be scolded!"
