Xiaomi

Lei Jun's Hard Tech Balancing Act

Once hailed as the “Apple of China,” Xiaomi has evolved into the world’s No. 3 smartphone brand. The Beijing giant wires millions of homes with its TVs, wearables, and appliances while pitching itself as a seamless “Human × Car × Home” platform.

Founder Lei Jun now wants to turn that consumer-electronics prowess into hard-tech dominance. In 2025 alone, Xiaomi debuted its first in-house chip (the XRING O1) and showed off its sleek SU7 electric sedan. Yet the scorecard is mixed: the Robotics Lab has been folded into the auto unit, the SU7’s shine dimmed after a fatal crash, and new U.S. export curbs threaten the flagship chip program just as it launches. Can a smartphone playbook built on rapid iterations and razor-thin margins really scale to cars, robots, and semiconductors?

In this piece, we let you hear Lei Jun in his own words, through two translated excerpts. One brims with sky-high ambition, while the other is steeped in damage control. Read them back-to-back and watch how Xiaomi’s grand vision collides with hard truths of physics, finance, and public accountability.

From budget phones to bold hardware

Chinese media celebrate Lei Jun as one of the country’s signature tech entrepreneurs. After graduating from Wuhan University and weathering several early start-up misfires, he assembled seven co-founders in 2010 around a crowdsourced Android ROM that grew into Xiaomi. The early strategy was straightforward: sell affordable, capable smartphones. That formula made Xiaomi a household name in phones and Internet of Things gadgets, but the 2016 debut of the bezel-less Mi MIX concept signaled a pivot from “internet hardware” to true hard tech. In the translated excerpts below, Lei Jun traces that evolution and lays out why he believes Xiaomi’s future rests on chips, cars, and robots.

The following excerpt is an original ChinaTalk translation of a December 2023 interview between Lei Jun and reporter Wang Ning, broadcast on CCTV.

Original link | archived

Lei Jun: Let me start with some Wuhan University memories. Thirty-six years ago, in 1987, I was admitted to its Computer Science department. Back then I lived almost entirely on scholarships and professors’ projects; those funds literally carried me through four years of college. At one award ceremony I received a sizable scholarship; standing on that stage I vowed that if I ever could, I would repay the university a hundred, a thousand — ten-thousand — fold.

Source: Sixth Tone

Lei Jun: My life-long dream was sparked in the Wuhan University library when I read Fire in the Valley, the story of Steve Jobs and early Silicon Valley. In the late ’80s, Jobs was my very first role model. But the more I understood Jobs, the clearer it became that I’m not him. Still, that doesn’t stop us from charting our own path and creating products that are different in their own right.

Angela: After graduating in 1991, Lei joined Kingsoft, a Chinese software company, where he progressed from software engineer to executive. Competing with Microsoft, Kingsoft faced countless problems including product flops and near bankruptcy. He then went on to found an online bookstore, Joyo.com, which was sold to Amazon in 2004.

Lei’s experiences with such missteps and missed timing during the early era of the internet led to his coining of the phrase, “Catch the right tail-wind and even a pig will fly” 站在风口上，猪也能飞起来, which he proceeds to explain in the interview.

Reporter Wang Ning: Your famous tail-wind principle is still quoted all the time.

Lei Jun: Back in my engineer-founder days we green-lit projects simply because they interested me or a few users asked for them; we rarely stopped to ask whether the timing offered explosive growth, so the companies survived but seldom scaled. That sort of company is hard to kill, but pushing it to greatness is equally hard.

That’s why I formulated the tail-wind principle. Don’t just keep your head down pulling the cart; look up and see where the wind is blowing. It was a major course-correction in my own playbook.

Reporter Wang Ning: What was the real test for you during that period?

Lei Jun: We had clearly missed the web’s prime window, so we kept asking when the next breakout would come; four or five years early we bet on mobile internet, but didn’t know when it would ignite—once the iPhone and Android hit, I knew the fuse was lit.

On Xiaomi’s “hard tech” pivot:

Lei Jun: Hard tech means chips, smart manufacturing, robotics, operating systems — those core layers.

Reporter Wang Ning: You keep hammering on hard tech.

Lei Jun: I do.

Reporter Wang Ning: Why is your drive to battle it out on hard tech so intense?

Lei Jun: We’re top-three worldwide, but we face giants: Apple, Samsung, Huawei. Without breakthroughs in core tech you’ll never build a moat or stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those titans. If Xiaomi dreams of being world-class, hard tech is non-negotiable.

Narrator: In 2020, Xiaomi’s tenth anniversary, it set a ten-year goal to become a next-generation hard-tech leader and deliver premium products.

Lei Jun: Every flagship product applies the newest, most advanced tech. Three years ago, I told the team we would benchmark against the iPhone across the board. This statement caused controversy. Were we just piggy-backing off of Apple’s fame to grab attention? But we must unsheathe the sword: set our own targets, dare to compare. Even if we lose all 100 metrics, daring to measure is step one. Can our phones really win? I had to persuade people over one-by-one that going premium takes patience, since earning user trust is a process.

Lei Jun: We started exploring operating systems from the very first days of the company. Seven years ago we resolved to create Xiaomi HyperOS, building the entire stack from the kernel up. Over 5,000 engineers have contributed, and we’ve just released the first version. Our goal is a human-centred, closed-loop platform that connects personal devices, the smart home, and the car.

Reporter Wang Ning: You’re working down at the OS layer — deep, technical stuff — yet you keep calling it ‘human-centred.’ What exactly does that mean in practice?

Lei Jun: AI is moving fast, so we’re baking the most advanced AI into HyperOS to give it a clear edge in intelligence over any rival platform. More importantly, that same intelligence has to knit together the entire “Human × Car × Home” ecosystem: people as in personal devices, cars as in a mobile smart space, and home as in smart appliances.

On electric vehicle strategy:

Reporter Wang Ning: Elon Musk called Xiaomi’s entry into the automotive industry “interesting competition.” Your response?

Lei Jun: Smart EVs merge auto and consumer electronics. One car CEO joked, “A smart EV is just an oversized smartphone on four wheels.” Not strictly true, but that shows the convergence. So yes, it’s challenging, but the difficulty is controllable.

Reporter Wang Ning: What do you mean by “difficulty is controllable”?

Lei Jun: Three years ago I still thought building a car was daunting, so I approached it with real humility. Our user research showed that when people hear ‘Xiaomi car’ they expect technology and an ecosystem. That led me to a guiding principle I call “nail the fundamentals, then amaze 守正出奇.” In practice it means: respect the hard rules of the auto business — quality, safety, manufacturing discipline, make sure the very first model is rock-solid, and only then layer on top the Xiaomi-style innovation that surprises the market.

Our second rule is ‘10-X investment.’ A typical automaker puts three to four hundred engineers and maybe one or two billion yuan into a new model; many cars you see are built on that. For our first car we assigned 3,400 engineers and spent more than ten billion yuan — over ten times the norm. With that level of commitment, I’m aiming to win.

Still, cars are complex. I worry about two opposite risks: the launch flops and nobody buys, or demand goes crazy and people wait a year and flame us for delays. Either way, there’s plenty of reasons for anxiety.

On Xiaomi's future amidst geopolitical uncertainty:

Reporter Wang Ning: With global turbulence and domestic headwinds, why double down on hard tech and stay confident?

Lei Jun: The tougher the climate, the more we should invest in technology. When others pull back, breakthroughs actually come easier, and we’re ready the moment the market rebounds. In fact, Xiaomi already returned to positive growth last quarter.

Why do we have the nerve to keep spending? Because in every field we play in there is still plenty of unmet demand; I believe Xiaomi is only at the starting line. Our approach is two-pronged: deepen our roots in China’s domestic market while pushing ahead with globalization. That’s the road we’ve chosen, and it’s still rich with opportunity.

Reporter Wang Ning: People say you don’t need to change since things are great. Yet you keep leaving your comfort zone. Why?

Lei Jun: At the core is the very high bar we’ve set for ourselves: to become a great technology company that lets everyone on the planet enjoy the benefits of innovation. The goal is so lofty that no matter how hard we jump, we still can’t quite reach it — yet that stretch is exactly what pulls the whole company forward. Xiaomi’s relentless evolution is powered by that dream.

Hard Tech, Hard Lessons

[Angela writing] 2021 marked Xiaomi’s leap into one dimension of hard tech, robotics, with the release of CyberDog, an open-source robot companion. A year later came CyberOne, a full-sized humanoid, and in 2023 the sleeker CyberDog 2. Commercially and technically, none hit the mark: CyberOne never reached mass production, and CyberDog 2 sales ran at a loss as buyers complained about its limited abilities. Attrition was another problem: high-profile engineers departed, with Liu Fang 刘方 (former autonomous-driving head) leaving to start his own robot firm and humanoid specialist Ren Zeyu 任赜宇 moving to ByteDance. By mid-2024 the Robotics Lab had been folded into Xiaomi’s auto division, its once-lofty ambitions reduced to building robots that service the company’s own factory lines.

The automotive story began the same year the robots debuted. In early 2021, Lei Jun learned that U.S. sanctions might hit Xiaomi and decided the firm had to diversify beyond phones. Xiaomi poured RMB 10 billion (US $1.5 billion) into an EV program, broke ground on a plant in Beijing’s Economic-Tech Zone, and — true to form — Lei personally test-drove more than 170 cars and earned a racing license, convinced that a top driver should helm a top car company. The gamble paid off fast: the SU7 electric sedan launched in 2024 to a rapturous market reception.

Yet momentum met reality on March 29th, 2025, when a Xiaomi SU7 electric sedan running in Navigate-on-Autopilot mode veered off the Dezhou–Shangrao Expressway in Anhui and slammed into a cement pole, killing three college students. The first fatality involving Xiaomi’s year-old EV led to nationwide uproar. The hashtag #SU7事故 raced onto Weibo’s hot-search list within hours, while Hong Kong–listed Xiaomi shares fell 5.5% the next trading day. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology banned marketing phrases like “smart driving” or “autonomous driving” and now requires pre-approval for any OTA updates that touch driver-assistance features. The event sparked debate over assisted-driving safety, wiped out new-car orders, and forced the company to publish detailed log data and promise a top-to-bottom safety overhaul.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun gave the following speech on May 22nd, 2025, for the company’s 15th anniversary. His address walks a tightrope between contrition and confidence, as he admits to the company’s past mistakes while promising to embrace the societal responsibility that comes with being a major automaker. The crisis shows the high degree of pressure on flagship Chinese tech companies, and how quickly the public, investors, and policymakers can converge when such a firm stumbles.

At the same time, Lei Jun widens the narrative by announcing Xiaomi’s newest chip, the XRING O1. On June 3rd, he predicted Xiaomi’s auto arm would turn a profit in Q2 2025. But will the company be able to live up to its bold ambitions?

Source: Mashable

The following excerpt is an original ChinaTalk translation of a speech given by Lei Jun on May 22, 2025. Transcript from Zhihu.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of Xiaomi’s founding. Today is a momentous day, and we prepared a series of celebratory events for it. However, at the end of March, a sudden traffic accident shattered all of that. We were hit by a storm of doubts, criticism, and blame. My colleagues and I were stunned.

A veteran of the auto industry told me, “In this business, accidents are bound to happen.” But no one expected the impact of this accident to be so massive, nor the blow to Xiaomi so heavy.

Thinking back to four years ago when we decided to build cars, I was especially worried about safety, so we placed enormous emphasis on vehicle quality and safety. After more than three years of relentless work by our automotive team, the SU7 has been on the road for just over a year — and its build quality has been our pride. In every independent test by the leading authorities, it has received top marks. Yet we never could have foreseen how this traffic accident would make us realize the public’s expectations and demands of us.

To be honest, only now do I recognize that we have always thought of ourselves as newcomers to the auto industry. This incident drove home a simple truth: Xiaomi’s scale, influence, and visibility have grown so much that society now expects us to act like a fully fledged industry leader. We understand, deeply, that after fifteen years this is a vital responsibility we cannot avoid.

So today, what I want to share with you is that 15-year-old Xiaomi is no longer a rookie. In all industries, we don’t have the grace period of true novices. We must hold ourselves to higher standards and goals.

On automotive safety, I want to announce to everyone that we aim to make our car the safest in its class. We will not just comply, nor merely meet the industry level; as a leader in the auto industry, we will guarantee safety that surpasses the industry standard.

This year on April 1st, I said publicly on Weibo that Xiaomi will never shy away from any issue. “Never shy away” means confronting problems head-on, examining ourselves critically, fixing what’s wrong, and committing to continuous improvement. I know accomplishing this is extremely difficult; it requires us to unite in heart and mind and take it with the utmost seriousness.

Over the past few months, I have held countless meetings with the automotive department’s management and team. All of these meetings have centered around one core theme: how do we solve these problems systematically? How do we convincingly show, through stronger operations and governance, that we’re living up to the public’s higher expectations?

This year is Xiaomi’s 15th anniversary. We have canceled many of the celebrations, summaries, and planning activities we had planned. In any case, I believe this is an opportunity for us to seriously review the wins and losses of the past five years.

In my view, the most important thing Xiaomi has done in the past five years is maintaining a strong technology foundation. Five years ago we set a new goal: to become a global leader in next-generation hard tech. Five years ago we made a clear commitment to invest more than 100 billion yuan in R&D over five years and to increase core technology research; to date we have invested about 105 billion. This year alone we expect to invest over 30 billion.

Today, here, I want to share an extremely important piece of news with you: our self-developed smartphone SoC chip, the Xuanjie 玄戒 O1, is expected to be released at the end of the month

After 10 years of making chips, this is Xiaomi’s milestone achievement. It also represents a new starting point for Xiaomi to break through in hard tech. Chipmaking is something the public and Xiaomi fans ardently expect from us; it is also the only path for Xiaomi to move toward becoming a hard-core tech leader. Xiaomi will forge ahead fearlessly.

2019 was a challenging period for us. We faced all kinds of internal and external pressures. At the suppliers’ conference at the end of that year, I told our supply-chain partners this line: “A gale reveals the toughest grass; a long road proves a horse’s strength.” “疾风知劲草，路遥知马力。[Editor’s note: The metaphorical meaning is along the lines of “true resilience is exposed only under pressure and over time.”]. I believe that from then till now, all our partners can clearly see that Xiaomi is much stronger than it was five years ago. As of today, Xiaomi has existed for 15 years. Years of highs, lows, and hard times have already proved just how resilient we are.

When we started, I remember thinking that people would need 15 years to understand and recognize Xiaomi. Today, it seems we were too optimistic — 15 years is not enough. But that’s all right; we will just keep moving forward until the day we have fully proven ourselves.

Xiaomi still has a long way to go before it becomes the strongest, but no one can match the persistence, resilience, and patience that keeps us getting back up every single time.

Xiaomi’s future

[Angela writing again] Will Lei Jun’s everywhere-everything strategy work?

Xiaomi’s smartphone success hinged on a strategy tailored to consumer electronics: rapid iteration, razor-thin margins. Hard tech plays by stricter rules. Robots, cars, and advanced chips demand flawless safety engineering, deep benches of specialist talent, and sustained capital infusions.

Xiaomi has already brushed up against each of these constraints. In the Robotics Lab, key engineers were stretched thin, while the first SU7 sedan shipped with a leaner, lidar-free sensor suite, a cost-saving choice that came under scrutiny after a fatal crash raised questions about perception margins. Complicating matters is the sheer sweep of the company’s ambition: pursuing cars, robots, and advanced chips threatens to disperse capital and engineering bandwidth, potentially leaving every moonshot a little short of the sustained focus that hard tech demands.

Even Apple doesn’t juggle cars, robots, and semiconductors all at once. The Silicon Valley behemoth shelved its car project after billions of R&D and keeps its robotics work firmly behind the curtain. For Xiaomi’s robotics and autos work, leaning into splashy launches and viral publicity for its hard tech projects has proven to be as much a liability as a strength.

Chips might be the exception, if Xiaomi can leverage its vast smartphone footprint into volume for its in-house silicon. The company’s newly announced Xring O1 and US$28 billion R&D pledge hints at genuine momentum. Yet geopolitics looms large: fresh US export curbs on electronic design automation software threaten to inflate costs, stretch design cycles, and slow the very updates those next-generation chips will depend on. Whether Lei Jun can temper showmanship with staying power will decide if Xiaomi’s hard-tech dream becomes a cornerstone of its ecosystem or just another chapter in China’s moonshot boom-and-bust cycle.

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