Xiaomi Corporation
Xiaomi Phone – “No Design” Design
“I admire giant companies like Huawei, Tencent, Sina and Alibaba, but I don’t want to create another Huawei, Tencent, Sina or Alibaba. My dream is to maintain my current company as a small one. (like a) small restaurant that people line up outside of to buy my products, and my friend will call me to reserve seats for them.” – Lei, a keynote address to the 2013 Global Mobile Internet
Conference, Beijing.
“How can I build a company in China that can last over 100 years?” Lei Jun, a back then
40-year-old investor and serial entrepreneur, always asked himself when he was thinking about founding a company to prove that high-end hardware can be made in China, despite the country’s reputation for manufacturing low-cost, low-quality goods. At that time, two very well-known and successful Chinese companies inspired him. One of them is Tong
Ren Tang, a 340-year-old traditional Chinese medicine company. It taught Lei that a company should never produce lower-quality products for the sake of cost. The other company is Hai Di Lao, a hot pot chain, which demonstrates how successful a restaurant can be by putting extremely strict emphasis on the superior customer service for over ten years. These two core values, high-quality product and service, eventually became the foundation and guidance of Lei’s new venture – Xiaomi Corporation, a smartphone company. In Lei’s prior career, he served as the CEO of Kingsoft, a Chinese antivirus software firm, and now remains chairman of the board. Lei is also the founder of Joyo, an online retailer he created in 2000. He sold the company four years later to Amazon for $75 million. Aside from his entrepreneurial success, Lei is also a renowned investor in Chinese companies, in which he owns minority stakes in a number of Chinese online enterprises. This experience gives him great insights into the growing Chinese internet industry.
In 2010, Lei founded Xiaomi Corporation with six other
“I admire giant companies like Huawei, Tencent, Sina and Alibaba, but I don’t want to create another Huawei, Tencent, Sina or Alibaba. My dream is to maintain my current company as a small one. (like a) small restaurant that people line up outside of to buy my products, and my friend will call me to reserve seats for them.” – Lei, a keynote address to the 2013 Global Mobile Internet
Conference, Beijing.
“How can I build a company in China that can last over 100 years?” Lei Jun, a back then
40-year-old investor and serial entrepreneur, always asked himself when he was thinking about founding a company to prove that high-end hardware can be made in China, despite the country’s reputation for manufacturing low-cost, low-quality goods. At that time, two very well-known and successful Chinese companies inspired him. One of them is Tong
Ren Tang, a 340-year-old traditional Chinese medicine company. It taught Lei that a company should never produce lower-quality products for the sake of cost. The other company is Hai Di Lao, a hot pot chain, which demonstrates how successful a restaurant can be by putting extremely strict emphasis on the superior customer service for over ten years. These two core values, high-quality product and service, eventually became the foundation and guidance of Lei’s new venture – Xiaomi Corporation, a smartphone company. In Lei’s prior career, he served as the CEO of Kingsoft, a Chinese antivirus software firm, and now remains chairman of the board. Lei is also the founder of Joyo, an online retailer he created in 2000. He sold the company four years later to Amazon for $75 million. Aside from his entrepreneurial success, Lei is also a renowned investor in Chinese companies, in which he owns minority stakes in a number of Chinese online enterprises. This experience gives him great insights into the growing Chinese internet industry.
In 2010, Lei founded Xiaomi Corporation with six other
References: Lee Fleming, Olav Sorenson. “Science as A Map In The Technological Search,” Strategic Management Journal, 25 (2004): 909-928. Wesley M. Cohen, Daniel A. Levinthal. “Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 35 (1990): 128-152. Carliss Y. Baldwin, Kim B. Clark. “Managing In An Age Of Modularity,” Harvard Business Review, 75 (1997): 84-93. Clayton M. Christensen, Micheal Overdorf. “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change,” Harvard Business Review, 78 (2000): 66-76. Corey Billington, Lee Fleming. “Technological evolution, standard interfaces, and new market opportunities,” POMS Series in Technology and Operations Management (1998), 11 (2002), 955-993. Renu Singh, “Can Xiaomi 's Amazon-Apple-Google Business Model Help It Conquer The World?”, September 9, 2013, http://seekingalpha.com/article/1681562-can-xiaomisamazon-apple-google-business-model-help-it-conquer-the-world, accessed December Melanie Lee, “Interview: China 's Xiaomi hopes for revolution in”, February 27, 2013, http://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCATRE81Q0RH20120227?sp=true, Richard Lai, “Xiaomi Phone review”, September 27, 2011, http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/27/xiaomi-phone-review/, accessed December 2013. Catherine Shu, “Xiaomi, What Americans Need To Know”, August 28, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/28/xiaomi-what-americans-need-to-know/, accessed Parmy Olson, “How China 's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices”, October 22, 2013,