"The chip industry should learn from the Internet to achieve free access, selling at cost price," Lei Jun, chairman of Xiaomi Technology, predicted at the 2013 Beijing Microelectronics International Seminar: in three to five years, there will certainly be a new chip company selling chips at the price of sand and achieving great success. Lei Jun estimated that if chips were free, high-end phones like Xiaomi would only cost 500 yuan RMB in the future.
On the same day, at the summit hosted by the Beijing Economic-Information Commission, Lei Jun gave a speech titled "Software plus Hardware plus Internet Ironman Three Events Leading the World".
Lei Jun introduced that the average age of Xiaomi's entrepreneurial team was 43 years old, with an average age of 40 when they started their business, which can be considered as elderly entrepreneurship. The main members came from four companies: Kingsoft, Google, Microsoft, and Motorola, with the first two or three hundred people having more than 10 years of work experience. The team was considered to have superlative configuration in Zhongguancun. Hugo Barra's joining made Lei Jun feel for the first time that Hugo Barra had enormous influence in Silicon Valley, and Xiaomi's fame also significantly increased with Hugo's arrival.
Lei Jun revealed that Xiaomi's sales this year would reach between 30 billion to 31 billion yuan. If things go smoothly, it could take one or two more years; if not, it could take two more years for Xiaomi to exceed 100 billion yuan. Because now Xiaomi sells over 2 million units per month, and all over the Internet, people criticize Xiaomi's 'hunger marketing'. "I apologize too," Lei Jun predicted that Xiaomi's shipments would at least double next year.
The secret behind Xiaomi's miracle, according to Lei Jun, stems from the success of the "software + hardware + Internet" triathlon model — software: weekly release of new versions, custom themes; hardware: best performance configuration, sold at mid-range prices; e-commerce: initially priced according to BOM (Bill of Materials); Internet thinking: mass line.
Talking about Redmi, Lei Jun recounted a detail: the birth of Redmi should thank Liang Sheng, deputy director of the Beijing Economic Information Commission. Last year at the beginning of the year, Liang Sheng asked Lei Jun whether he could create a Redmi to drive the domestic industrial chain.
"Our original idea was to focus on the highest end, we didn't do mass-market models, so this time we did a mass-market model, creating Redmi. After Redmi was released at the end of July, it far exceeded my expectations."
Lei Jun said that initially he felt uneasy about such products. But after its release, how good was the response? A product priced at 799 yuan was being resold on Taobao for 1900 yuan, and now it is generally being sold for over 1000 yuan. It's hard to imagine that low-end products could have such a large volume and such strong demand. Therefore, as long as the product is well done, it can still achieve good returns.
Lei Jun said: after doing Kingsoft and Joyo.com for over 20 years, but doing Xiaomi for just over two years, he received gifts from users, dozens of times more than in the past 20 years. On the first working day after the New Year, a fan from Guizhou waited downstairs for a long time, presenting Lei Jun with a calendar. All the photos on this calendar were pictures of Lei Jun speaking at various conferences online, self-printed and handmade, telling Lei Jun it took three days to make, then flew to Beijing to give it to him. "At that moment, I was quite moved."