Author | Zhou Zhiyu

At the Shanghai Auto Show a year ago, Lei Jun carried his phone through various booths to “learn from the experience”. At the Beijing Auto Show a year later, no one expected Xiaomi cars to be a threat; at the Beijing Auto Show a year later, Lei Jun became a walking “top class”, and Xiaomi also slaughtered the entire industry and initiated a major reshuffle.

On April 25, the first day of the Beijing Auto Show, “Patriarch in Red” Zhou Hongyi and “top of the wheel” Lei Jun stopped at various booths. Photos and videos of their meetings with Ningde Era Chairman Zeng Yuqun and BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu and other auto industry bosses continued to flash on social media.

Wherever Lei Jun went, a huge fan group accompanied him along the way — the center of the auto market has already brought Lei Jun into the market with the Xiaomi SU7, and it has changed dramatically.

Lei Jun was also at the auto show. In just 20 minutes, he gave a classic marketing course to car company executives. While reporting the latest developments such as the number of orders and deliveries of Xiaomi locks to Foreign Exchange, he once again demonstrated his ability to establish an emotional connection with users.

As of April 24, the number of Xiaomi SU7 locks sold reached 75,723 units. This means that after answering questions from investors on April 21, the number of Xiaomi SU7 locks increased by more than 5,000 units in just 4 days.

Lei Jun withstood a “small test” in the early days of a NEV company's launch. Not only did Xiaomi not “lose orders” due to limited production capacity and continuous delays in delivery, but it was a further increase.

He quipped that many things have happened in the past four days, such as Tesla's price cut by 14,000 yuan, friend merchants cut orders from Hu and Xiaomi, etc., yet so many users still lock their orders. Lei Jun believes that this is a reflection of the strong product power of the Xiaomi SU7.

Subsequently, Lei Jun also used the results of various media and users' actual battery life tests, actual performance tests, intelligent driving tests, and sunscreen tests on the Xiaomi SU7 to once again strengthen users' mentality, showing that the Xiaomi SU7 was indeed “personally tested by millions of netizens and carefully selected by millions of netizens.”

He didn't forget to analyze the reasons why the Xiaomi SU7 successfully broke the circle. For example, preliminary research on users shows that female owners of the Xiaomi SU7 are estimated to account for 40%-50%. They chose the Xiaomi SU7 because of its good-looking appearance, detailed storage, and excellent sun protection and insulation ability; the intelligent ability impressed traditional car users, including the BBA, and was friendly to Apple users, making the Xiaomi SU7 account for 51.9% of Apple buyers.

Of course, Lei Jun also knows that if the number of orders and sales of the Xiaomi SU7 is to continue to increase, while playing with his marketing methods, he still needs to work hard on the delivery issue.

Lei Jun revealed that only 28 days after the launch of the Xiaomi SU7, 5,781 Xiaomi SU7 units were successfully delivered. The Xiaomi car factory is also making every effort to expand production capacity so that different versions of the Xiaomi SU7 can be delivered to users earlier, and plans to deliver more than 10,000 vehicles per month in June, and complete the delivery of 100,000 vehicles by the end of 2024.

Compared to Xiaomi's previous production capacity plan for its first car, now it is indeed speeding up with vigor. This also far exceeded the expectations of the capital market. Over the past four trading days, Xiaomi Group's stock price has increased by a cumulative total of 5.03%.

Agencies including J.P. Morgan Chase and Citi are also optimistic about Xiaomi's next performance, believing that it can achieve a gross profit margin of 5-10% next year.

However, before the scale of Xiaomi cars reached a new level (300,000 vehicles), the agency still had some differences about its overall business status.

Although the automobile industry needs marketing changes to be closer to users, it is essentially still a manufacturing industry, and automobile production, technology research and development, and after-sales are all facing a series of difficulties. As strong as Tesla, as well as this year's new “New Force One Brother”, have all experienced hardships and climbed up after falling.

Now that it's been three years since the car was built and the first car was not delivered to the full moon, the “siege and interception” experienced by friends and merchants is nothing but an appetizer. Over the past three years, new energy changes have swept through different price ranges, but in the price range of 200,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan, there are quite a few players who have been successful for a short time and have monthly sales of over 10,000, yet there are very few people who want to stabilize this market and continue to sell more than 10,000 per month.

Players that used to be in the price range of 200,000 yuan or more, such as BYD Han and Xiaopeng G6, are also in a rolling price war to drop sales below 200,000 yuan; they are also booming and questioning the world, driving their target users from around 300,000 yuan to the 200,000 yuan price range. The competition in this market is getting tougher.

J.P. Morgan Chase Auto Analysts also confessed in an email to Wall Street News that the price environment is unlikely to improve drastically this year, or even after entering 2025. Automakers are still adopting aggressive pricing strategies for new models.

Even if the production capacity of the Xiaomi SU7 can be further released next year, it may launch an SUV model in order to drive further sales growth, but after the “rice fans” paid for their dreams in the early stages, Xiaomi cars will also have to face Xiaomi's “unpopular” user groups and go hand in hand with the new energy car companies that are now burning. In the next two years, Xiaomi will face its real “big test.”

Lei Jun also knows that Xiaomi still has a lot of homework to complete. He said that in the next three years, Xiaomi will focus 100% on the domestic market. At the Beijing Auto Show, he also posted heroic posts to recruit talents from around the world to build the car of his dreams.

Before becoming a giant in the global automotive industry, Xiaomi will have to go through decades of verification to achieve this ambitious goal.

After a lapse of four years, the Beijing Auto Show opened again. It was the largest and largest number of first models ever at the Beijing Auto Show, and the number of new energy vehicles released was 70% higher. Also, in the past four years, China's NEV industry has gone from being a frontier industry to a vortex of price wars, and the stock prices of many new-power car companies have fallen by more than 90% at their peak. The story of the rotation of the industry cycle and the fall of a car-building star unfolded one after another over the past four years.

With “groundbreaking traffic,” Lei Jun shocked the industry, but can it really become the “catfish” that stirred up the century-old automobile industry like Tesla? The test has only just begun.