Lei How to do millet miracle: direction No problem, the details are biased

December 16, 2014, a "Chinese business Oscar," said the Chinese Best Business Leadership Award (Cbla,china Business leaders won) to the founder of the Millet Lei, the day is Lei's birthday.

2014, the mobile phone, television, flat, intelligent hand ring, air purifier, such as millet product line in full bloom. More importantly, Lei led Millet to create a "hardware + Software + Internet Service" eco-circle, has become a manufacturing enterprise embracing the internet thinking of business model innovation model case. Award words such evaluation: Lei founded Millet is not China's apple, but the world's millet.

December 29, Millet completed a new round of financing, the company valued at 45 billion U.S. dollars. From entrepreneurship to valuation of 43 billion U.S. dollars, just four years, Millet created the company's history of the miracle.

How did lei do it? "Innovation is the root cause," he said in an exchange with the 21st century Economic report.

"The direction is no problem, the details are biased."

2010 when the establishment of millet, lei feel that there are two conditions have matured: one is to see the external environment, found a huge opportunity, the second is the individual completed the idea of zero, after two years of thinking, he has a new understanding of the future.

Lei thinks there are two big opportunities outside of 2014: one is mobile social (instant messaging in China) and the other is smartphones. Mobile socializing is the gateway to the cloud and the end, and the smart terminal is the new user interface.

How big are these two chances? Lei's initial estimate is a 10 billion dollar (market capitalisation) opportunity. At that time, China's market value of 10 billion U.S. dollars companies only three: Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba.

Based on this judgment, Lei made two products: one is rice chat, the direction is mobile social, the second is Millet mobile phone, the direction is smartphone. As long as you succeed in one direction, you can shoulder the bat.

Four years after the inventory, Lei evaluation of their own judgment as "direction no problem, the details are biased." In the direction, although not yet listed, Millet's smartphone business valuation has reached 43 billion U.S. dollars, if the public listing, millet mobile phone market value has a chance to break 100 billion U.S. dollars; in mobile social, the alternative of rice chat to Tencent added at least 100 billion dollars: 2010, Tencent's market capitalisation is just over $50 billion trillion, now worth more than $160 billion trillion, once approaching 200 billion dollars.

The bias in detail is that LEI estimates that 10 billion dollars will be generated in each direction, in fact 100 billion dollars. Because of this, lei recently in the media interview that four years ago, for millet company valuation "less than a 0".

In the context of mobile socializing, Lei's judgment is also biased in detail. At that time Lei's judgment is that the biggest competitor is the mobile phone QQ, rice chat at least 80% of the odds, because mobile phone QQ is based on the PC, rather than mobile phones. But Tencent chose two fronts at the same time war, Pianan Guangzhou's micro-letter team under the leadership of Zhangxiaolong, based on Tencent in the Internet real-time communications technology based on the accumulation of 3 months to develop a fully compliant with mobile internet users of the micro-letter.

In smartphones, Lei's judgment is also biased in detail. In Lei's judgment, Android, Symbian, and iOS will coexist for some time, with Android growing fastest and eventually becoming the market's first, with Windows and BlackBerry as small players remaining. Millet choose Android, on the basis of ecological purification to complete their own ecological construction. But in 2010, Nokia renounced Symbian and embraced windows, giving Android a huge opportunity: Android swallowed the Symbian market and became the market's absolute first.

In addition to the "valuation of the company less than a 0", lei another did not think that millet only used four years of time sales to reach the level of 60 million, four years to start internationalization, diversification, start the ecological chain construction.

Two of billions of dollars, give Lei experience is faceted: on the one hand, innovation must be at the right time to do the right thing, to find the tuyere, homeopathy and for; On the other hand, things are evolving, and there's a whole lot more to it than you can foresee. Some of these unpredictable details are positive and some are negative. These are not important, find the right direction of action, you have the opportunity.

Middle Road

The success of Millet mobile phone, in addition to the direction of the election, Lei also did the right things?

In products, millet technology is the most outside relish is "triathlon" product development model, that is, "Software + hardware + Internet." This model is not the first millet, Apple is the product model of the beginning of Yong. Early in the PC era, Apple pursued a closed eco-chain strategy, providing an integrated PC from "Software + hardware PC applications". This differs from IBM's approach to open industry standards, where software, hardware, chips, software and applications are provided by different vendors in an open industry standard model.

In the PC era, Apple's closed strategy won its first victory, and later became a loser. In the smartphone era, Apple followed this pattern and made a huge success. After the success of the mobile phone, Apple even began to reverse the PC market.

Open or closed, which path will the future hardware industry take? Lei that in the long run, the development of the hardware industry will be a middle road: it is not a completely open industrial standard model, because it will create a mixed ecological circle, such as China's PC industry heyday, the country has dozens of brands of PC manufacturers, Shanzhai, and not a complete closed mode, which will make the biosphere lifeless, New entrants do not have the opportunity to eventually form a single big, unable to form full competition.

The middle road can not only ensure the health of the ecological chain, but also ensure the vitality of the savage growth of the ecological chain. Lei a word: No matter the great entrepreneur, or the great politician, are the perfect combination of realism and idealism. But in the hardware industry path choice, the Middle road is embodying this thought logic.

In fact, the middle road of millet is not completely copied Apple road. In product form, millet is software + hardware + Internet, in the industrial division of labor, it is under the unified standard, the maximum to attract social resources to participate. Millet also through the research, investment and other means involved in many links, but the purpose is to ecological chain species rich.

What is millet?

Millet from the start of the day, not only outside people, and even millet company people are asking, millet is a kind of company.

is millet a mobile phone company? No. According to Lei, Millet currently has three core products, including smartphones, televisions and boxes, routers, this is the core of Millet circle layer; The second circle layer outside the core circle is the hardware industry chain of millet investment, including millet power supply, Huami hand ring, smart meter air purifier, millet camera, intelligent blood pressure meter, etc. The third ring layer is the millet electric business open platform, in addition to selling millet their own products, but also to the third party brand Open; Four is the MIUI operating system, not only for the use of millet products, but also for third-party hardware manufacturers.

December 14, 2014 night, the United States Group officially issued a notice to confirm with millet to reach strategic cooperation. The United States will be 23.01 yuan per share price to the millet directional additional 55 million shares, raise funds amount to not more than 1.266 billion yuan. In the hardware industry, Millet has invested in 25 hardware companies, initially planning to invest 100 companies, investment is expected to 5 billion U.S. dollars.

Will millet future be a hardware company? In fact, millet in addition to investment in the hardware industry 5 billion U.S. dollars, there are two other 1 billion dollar investment plan, one is the cloud computing industry, one is the video and content industry.

December 3, 2014, Lei, chairman of Millet and chairman of Jinshan, announced plans to spend 1 billion of dollars investing in cloud services. The same day, Jinshan, millet and Temasek common investment century interconnection 296 million of dollars. One of the Lei's Jinshan and millet total contribution of 220 million U.S. dollars. Investment century interconnection is part of the 1 billion dollar investment cloud service.

Video content, November 14, 2014, millet 300 million dollar investment Archie art. Previously, millet not only invested in Archie, but also in March 2014 to invest in the Thunderbolt 200 million U.S. dollars; October 2014, Lei holds 90% stake in Beijing, the media to participate in the Chinese film-play 2 billion directional additional, investment 50 million yuan; November 2014, Millet from the two-level market to buy Youku potato stocks, The amount is not less than 50 million dollars; In addition, Millet also invests in B station 3 million dollars.

Hardware + Internet content and services + cloud service platform, which is now the millet architecture. Lei thinks, Millet is an open platform company, any partner can obtain the energy on the millet platform, grows under the Internet big background.

In the case of application providers, millet, as an Internet portal, a platform provider, provides IT infrastructure to a few 100,000 or even millions of developers, just as Amazon does for developers now.

For hardware providers, the ability of the Millet platform includes: first, the ability to negotiate with the supply chain; the second is the sales channel; the third is to connect with more hardware, and the software, application and service of MIUI platform.

Lei's inspiration to the industry is that all the hardware in the future will be a net, and that all companies in the future must be Internet companies, a big backdrop for all the company's innovations.