The world’s fourth largest smartphone vendor, Xiaomi, celebrated its tenth anniversary with a CEO-delivered three-hour long public speech and the launches of several new products, demonstrating the company’s future strategies.
Will the young firm keep growing? Image credit: Xiaomi
Founded in 2010, Xiaomi (01810:HK) ushered in its second decade in 2020. Lei Jun, the founder and CEO of the company delivered a speech on August 12 as a memorial to Xiaomi’s achievements in its first ten years and a business blueprint for the next stage.
Mr. Lei promised three principles for Xiaomi’s future development, which are technology as the foundation, price-efficiency as the key and presenting the coolest products. By announcing the mass production of the world’s first TV with a transparent OLED display panel and the promise of investing over CNY 10 billion into R&D, the CEO exemplified the company’s principles.
The transparent TV edition has a custom MediaTek 9650 chipset with the company’s AI Master Smart Engine image processing that offers over 20 optimization algorithms and dedicated optimization for five major use scenarios. The product is indeed impressive – but without much public attention as the first launch of Mi MIX phones in 2016, perhaps due to the unaffordable price at around USD 7,100.
For future strategies, the CEO emphasized entrepreneurship, Internet-empowered manufacturing and long-term thinking. Lei claims that Xiaomi will continue the cooperation with its ODMs. Meanwhile, it will get deeply involved with the manufacturing industry by introducing more technology empowerment to traditional production lines. To date, the company’s industrial fund has invested in over 70 semiconductor and smart manufacturing firms, seeking for its own economic moat that is comprised of supply chain dominance, fine products and customer stickiness.