Recruitment in Chen Jing

Lead: In recent years, Xiaomi has invested in nearly 30 enterprises in the automotive field, involving self-driving software and hardware, complete vehicles and sales. Judging from the category of Xiaomi's acquisition company, Lei Jun seems to be interested in building a supply chain that belongs to making cars. Xiaomi has played a role in the mobile phone supply chain, so can it be perfectly applied to the car-making plan?

It's been about 100 days since Xiaomi announced to build the car.

From March 30th to July 25th, after Lei Jun announced to build a car at the 2020 Xiaomi Spring Conference, Xiaomi's car-building plan was like "going up in smoke", and Xiaomi officially never released any valuable news. This makes people have to wonder whether Xiaomi's car is a real car or a gimmick to raise the company's share price.

But in fact, although Lei Jun didn't move after he announced that he would build a car, he visited domestic mainstream car companies including Chang 'an, SAIC, Dongfeng, GAC, SAIC-GM-Wuling and Great Wall. It is worth mentioning that Lei Jun also appeared in the headquarters of Bosch and Contemporary Ampere Technology Co., Ltd.. In addition, Xiaomi has successively invested in Mu Zong Technology and Jose Technology, and was exposed to acquire Deep Motion. After the layout of the autonomous driving company, Xiaomi began to accelerate the recruitment of autonomous driving engineers and even labeled them as urgently needed jobs.

Not long ago, some media broke the news that Xiaomi has successfully invested in 400 companies, forming the largest "friend circle" in China except Ali and Tencent. Judging from the characteristics of Xiaomi investment, it mainly invests in enterprises related to its own industrial ecology. Generally speaking, it can be divided into two categories, one is strategic investment based on Xiaomi ecological chain, and the other is industrial investment based on supply chain. Specifically, eco-chain investment is more inclined to product categories, and the invested enterprises provide Xiaomi with products in many fields such as smart home, daily necessities, wearability and travel. The relationship between Xiaomi and them is procurement and supply, which are sold in Xiaomi House and Youpin Mall.

The supply chain mainly focuses on product categories, providing technology and core components for Xiaomi mobile phones and intelligent hardware. For example, Chen Jing Semiconductor invested by Xiaomi mainly develops multimedia intelligent application processor chips. In addition, Xiaomi's high-end electronic material manufacturing, Fangbang shares and other enterprises invested by Xiaomi have provided full guarantee for its development.

With Lei Jun's announcement of building a car, Xiaomi began to lay out the car-related supply chain. Compared with Xiaomi's mobile phone supply chain, Xiaomi's layout in the car-making supply chain is no longer limited to hardware facilities, but includes autonomous driving technology into the supply chain, including the D3 round of financing led by Mu Zong Science and Technology, as well as the financing of Lidar Creation Company and Wosai Technology. A series of investments have proved that Xiaomi is preparing for his car-making plan.

In fact, many people don't understand why Xiaomi copied the supply chain model of Xiaomi mobile phone into Xiaomi's car-making plan. Most people think that Xiaomi builds a supply chain for its car-making plan to ensure the stable production of products and have more independent control rights. This answer is not without any problems. The only drawback is that it fails to tell the benefits of the entire Xiaomi supply chain.

Under the internet mode, Xiaomi's supply chain is a pull strategy, with the advantages of rapid information transmission and shortened lead time. At present, most enterprises adopt TTC, which refers to the time from product demand forecast, receipt of orders to delivery of products to customers. TTM refers to the time from new product design, research and development to market entry.

Taking Xiaomi mobile phone as an example, TTM is the time from early research and development, fan participation design, mass production design to new product release of each generation of new mobile phones. TTC reflects the supply chain speed of enterprises to meet the needs of order customers, that is, the time from ordering to receiving goods. For new products, the advantage of supply chain lies in TTM, which realizes the main goal of TTM to minimize supply chain strategy.

We may not understand the theory, but we can take Xiaomi mobile phone as an example to introduce the advantages of TTM/TTC. In the process of R&D, Xiaomi Mobile works closely with upstream core suppliers, including participating in chip development in MediaTek and Qualcomm, so as to obtain mass-produced chips at lower prices in a shorter time. In addition, bring end customers into the R&D chain, experience and feedback their engineering prototypes, closely integrate the supply chain with the development chain, and launch mass-produced mobile phones to the market as soon as possible. When products enter the growth stage and mature stage, the advantage of supply chain lies in TTC. On the basis of balancing costs and benefits, TTC is minimized, including procurement, production, distribution and other processes.

In other words, TTC and TTM play different roles in different stages of the product, but how to minimize them plays a key role in whether the product can become the "focus" of the market. In the same way, Xiaomi will copy the success of Xiaomi's mobile phone supply chain into Xiaomi's car-making plan, which is bound to play an excellent role in Xiaomi's car-making. Especially under the background that major car companies are accelerating new energy vehicle products, how to quickly build a cost-effective product will play a decisive role in the success of Xiaomi's car-making plan.

Taking Xiaomi's acquisition of lidar as an example, Huawei once proposed to reduce the cost of lidar to less than $200. In fact, if you want to reduce the price of lidar to less than $200, you can do it now, for example, adopting the scheme of semiconductor laser MEMS galvanometer APD reception. However, the peak power of semiconductor laser in this scheme is limited, and the detection distance of 50m has reached the limit. In other words, the best way to reduce the price of lidar is to realize large-scale production.

In this case, if Xiaomi can combine the advantages of the whole supply chain to realize the mass production of Xiaomi cars, lidar will also realize large-scale production. By then, not only the price of lidar will be reduced, but also the supply chain of Xiaomi automobile will develop healthily and the cost performance of Xiaomi automobile will be further improved. However, whether this goal can be achieved depends on how Xiaomi builds a supply chain dedicated to Xiaomi cars.

In addition to the cost advantage, a perfect supply chain will bring stronger responsiveness to products and ensure that the launch speed of products can keep up with the development of the market. At present, the supply chain strategic design of most enterprises can be divided into two levels. One is the horizontal level: how many different supply chains need to be designed to meet products with different demand characteristics; 1. Vertical dimension: In time dimension, how to adjust the different stages of product life cycle to the most suitable supply chain strategy.

Taking Xiaomi mobile phone series as an example, the demand and supply characteristics of Xiaomi 1 Xiaomi 4 are quite different horizontally, corresponding to SC 1-SC4 of supply chain strategy. Vertically, each generation of products is in different life cycle stages. 1 generation products have basically withdrawn from the market, the second generation products are in the mature stage, the third generation products are in the growth stage, and the fourth generation products are in the R&D introduction stage. Under such circumstances, Xiaomi mobile phone has the ability to quickly respond to market demand and strengthen the competitiveness of Xiaomi. By the same token, it is very important to respond to the market demand quickly under the circumstance of the accelerated development of automobile "four modernizations". Therefore, after Xiaomi successfully built the exclusive Xiaomi automobile supply chain, the impact on the automobile industry is still relatively large.

Generally speaking, cars are more complicated than mobile phones, but they are not completely irrelevant. They all have many of the same attributes. Therefore, in addition to loving the closed loop of your ecological chain, Xiaomi hopes to find new profit growth points on the basis of Xiaomi's mobile phone business model.

Many people will say that Xiaomi has many advantages, including a perfect supply chain and sufficient funds. However, this is not the biggest advantage of Xiaomi Automobile. Its biggest advantage lies in its chips. According to the latest data, Weilai Automobile delivered 49,887 vehicles from June to July, ranking first in the new power list. The success of Weilai Automobile cannot be separated from the promotion of Anhui SASAC. After all, when Weilai Automobile was facing a crisis of survival, it was Anhui SASAC that helped Weilai Automobile. Of course, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Anhui Province has also obtained an excess return in the process of investing in Weilai Automobile.

Not long ago, some media reported that the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Anhui Province was in contact with Xiaomi Automobile and intended to introduce Xiaomi Automobile to Hefei. According to relevant sources, "Hefei and Xiaomi are negotiating, and Xiaomi is expected to settle in Hefei, but the specific investment policy is still unclear." For this news, Xiaomi Public Relations Department said "no response". To some extent, Xiaomi is in a wait-and-see state at this stage, because before the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Anhui Province contacted Xiaomi, cities including Chengdu and Wuhan extended olive branches to Xiaomi. Because once Xiaomi builds a car in a city, it can not only provide a lot of employment opportunities, but also contribute to the city's GDP.

Unlike Weilai Automobile, Weilai Automobile's options in those years were unique, while Xiaomi is multi-choice at this stage, with negotiation qualifications and more chips. In order to attract Xiaomi to settle down, all major cities have offered rich conditions. Although we still don't know which city Xiaomi finally chooses to settle in, it is certain that when Xiaomi officially announces that he will settle in a certain city, he will definitely get strong support and the development will be smoother.

comment

It has been more than 100 days since Xiaomi announced the construction of the car. Lei Jun, who seems to have no action, has actually paved a smooth road for his car-making plan. In this context, when Xiaomi Automobile officially announced the "start-up", it means that the preparation work of Xiaomi Automobile has reached a perfect state, and it is even possible to break through the pattern of new power head players at this stage.