On November 23, Xiaomi released its Q3 results and revealed the latest developments in the company's electric vehicle business.
According to Xiaomi Group, the smart electric vehicle business is progressing smoothly, with more than 500 team members, while reiterating the goal of formal mass production of cars in the first half of 2024.
On the 18th of this month, Xiaomi Automotive Technology Co., Ltd. was established. Tianyan investigation shows that the legal representative of the company is Lei Jun, with a registered capital of 1 billion yuan, and Xiaomi Science and Technology Co., Ltd. is wholly owned.
This is not Xiaomi's first car company. Xiaomi Automobile Co., Ltd. has officially completed its industrial and commercial registration with a registered capital of 10 billion yuan, and its legal representative is also wholly owned by Lei Jun; Xiaomi EV Limited, a spokesman for Xiaomi said on its official Weibo.
The business scope of the two companies includes vehicle manufacturing of new energy vehicles; technical research and development of automotive vehicles and spare parts; intelligent vehicle equipment manufacturing; lithium-ion battery manufacturing; sales of automobiles, auto parts, road motor vehicle production and so on.
Two major plans to expand the "moments"
In addition to the hundreds of car-related patents already in hand, cooperation and investment and acquisition are the two major means for the company to lay out the industrial chain and catch up with the pace of "predecessors" as new car builders.
On the one hand, Xiaomi quickly cut into many aspects of autopilot through investment and acquisition. Lidar manufacturer Wesai Technology, ADS/ADAS supplier Longmu Technology, autopilot company Deep Motion, Shanghai Geometry partner, a manufacturer of autopilot hardware and software integrated systems, etc., have all been invested / acquired by Xiaomi. Among them, Wesai Science and Technology announced on the 16th that D-round raised more than 370 million US dollars and was chased by Xiaomi.
At the same time, Xiaomi has also invested in BYD Semiconductor, Zhanxin Electronics, Canxin Semiconductor, Yutai Microelectronics, Core Microelectronics, Yunying Valley Technology and so on. In terms of batteries, Honeycomb Energy and Ganfeng Lithium Power have also received investment from Xiaomi.
On the other hand, Lei Jun personally visited a number of potential suppliers, including not only FAW, SAIC, Changan, Dongfeng and other traditional car companies, but also did not miss Bosch, Ningde era and other upstream suppliers.
Expand the army, and then expand the army.
Xiaomi said today that the car-building team has more than 500 members.
Review of the company's car-building process: on September 1, the company "has received more than 20,000 resumes" with a team of nearly 300 people; on October 19, Lei Jun revealed that the R & D team had a total of 453 people.
In other words, the team has recruited at least two new people a day on average over the past three months.
With the rapid growth of the team, the company has also launched a talent incentive program. On October 25th, Xiaomi Group held a special general meeting of shareholders to approve the adoption of Xiaomi EV's equity incentive plan.
Management said that at present, Xiaomi EV does not have a separate listing financing plan, emphasizing that the group has enough cash and cash flow to support the company to fully engage in the automotive business, while the current Xiaomi auto talent incentive program is to better motivate employees to fully engage in the automotive business.
The agency believes that Xiaomi already has a large reserve at the automotive technology end, and the stacking of thousands of stores is expected to pave the way for car sales. In view of this, its car construction "from scratch does not mean that it is unprepared". If it is successfully mass produced in 2024, it is expected to catch up with the reshuffle of the permeability of new energy vehicles with a penetration rate of more than 20%, and turn on the third largest hardware growth engine.
However, Guojin Securities warned that the deficiency of Xiaomi's next car construction lies in the lack of vehicle platform design and manufacturing capacity and its own lack of self-driving related car technology accumulation. In the later stage, the short board will be made up and a new long board will be established by the way of investment / M & A + endogenous incubation.
