Millet Company announced yesterday afternoon, Chen as vice president to join the millet company

Millet Company announced yesterday afternoon, the original Sina Network editor-in-chief, Sina Executive vice President Chen as vice president of the identity of the company, responsible for content investment and content operation of the business, first will be responsible for the Millet TV and box video content.

Chen's entry, plus a week ago in charge of marketing and Millet network vice President Li Vanchang "Retreat", can be determined is not just a change in senior management personnel, but millet company to the outside of the strategy to adjust the signal: from marketing, product transfer to millet CEO lei Mouth said "ecological chain construction and content operation."

For ordinary users, the most common digital consumption content is video, video content can occupy users more time, viscous high, can also bring a lot of advertising revenue. But as the domestic video website competition intensifies, the content is becoming more and more expensive, the current domestic TV series of single set price range from hundreds of thousands of to more than 1 million yuan, high-quality American TV series such as "Card House" single collection cost tens of thousands of dollars.

According to the information of the press conference, the attitude of millet to the content will be close to smart home: Do not rely on complete self-control, but more through investment, mergers and acquisitions of the way to obtain good products. Earlier, Lei said it would invest 10 billion yuan in 50 start-ups, while the company claimed the first batch of $1 billion to invest in video content producers for Chen's content operations.

The introduction of investment needs financial support, the recent Bloomberg news appears to be timely: Millet is recently negotiating a new round of financing, after the financing, millet company's valuation can reach 400 to 50 billion U.S. dollars. If you don't have a concept in mind, look at the few listed companies with a market capitalisation of around 400 to 50 billion dollars:

9 listed companies with market capitalisation of around 40.05 trillion USD (data source: Google Finance)

Since the difficulty of obtaining capital is different, the value of private companies and publicly traded companies is not directly equivalent to the market capitalisation, the general will be higher after the listing. For a 4-year-old, 3-year-old hardware maker, 400 to 50 billion valuations are staggering. At present, Airbus, canon, Nissan car, such as operating a few decades old companies, the market value of only more than 40 billion U.S. dollars.

Millet's valuation is soaring, also shows the future development of millet is very optimistic. In less than 1.5 of the time, the value of millet from 10 billion U.S. dollars rose 3 times times, behind the sky-high valuation, is the millet mobile phone has lasted for 4 years of explosive growth. This is millet is expected to become the next like Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba like the Chinese science and technology giants of the base:

Especially in the last 3 quarters of this year, Millet has grown rapidly from a new brand to the third largest competitor in the world:

Sales of major smartphones outside Apple and Samsung in the past 5 quarters (data source: IDC)

Not just the hardware, but the entrance.

According to the Millet company's own recently announced forecasts, only this year, Millet mobile phone sales will be more than 60 million, according to the first three quarters of sales, 60 million is not exaggerated. Next year millet is expected to reach 100 million, a figure equivalent to the Nokia handset sales in its heyday in 2011:

Millet mobile phone sales over the years and forecast (data sources, millet)

Millet mobile phone sales surge behind its own electric power network "Millet net" work, the current online channels accounted for 70% of total millet sales. Lei in a recent speech, said the millet network has become the domestic Ali and Jingdong outside the third largest electric business website. This is also just announced "retreat" of the Millet Vice President Li Vanchang is responsible for the most important business, he was in the post, through excellent forum, social media and internet marketing, create topics and time, with very low cost to do the millet network.

But behind the surge in sales is not just the increase in hardware sales, the more important meaning of the millet mobile phone is that it is an Internet portal. When many domestic manufacturers are imitating millet "high configuration" way to launch products below 2000 yuan, but found that "hardware" market is increasingly facing homogenization, because they still lack of this ring: to provide consumers with software and services.

The MIUI of Millet is a fairly successful example. It is earlier than the birth of millet mobile phone, is the core competitiveness of millet mobile phone, after 4 years of development has become a millet company's "financial resources" one. Millet official announced MIUI active users have exceeded 70 million, the theme stores, application stores, games center of the daily download more than 35 million times, of which the game business is becoming an important source of income for millet.

MIUI and micro-letter active users (data source: Tencent, Millet)

There is still a gap between the numbers, but most MIUI active users are spending hundreds of to thousands of yuan to buy millet hardware products users, and micro-letter did not get the threshold. In addition, as a company that controls both software and hardware, Millet's control over content consumption is certainly stronger. In the mobile gaming industry, Millet has become the biggest distribution channel after Baidu and 360, surpassing Tencent and pea pods.

The mobile phone, however, is only one of the lei layout of the Internet content distribution channels. Millet company is still laying the distribution channel hardware and the following diagram shows these, they are all around the MIUI and with the millet cloud data, ready to capture you in the use of mobile phone time:

Walked Li Vanchang came to the Chen, also indicates the millet from the mobile phone set up the entrance, to use the entrance to provide you with the consumption content of the era, this is Sohu video, music video, Baidu Archie Art even Alibaba and Tencent's recently spent a huge sum of money into the online video. At the press conference yesterday, when Chen was asked whether it would become a competitor, he gave a positive answer.

Not only the content consumption dispute, even wooing the third party company, Lei and Millet also and is using the investment to penetrate into each domain Tencent, Alibaba very similar.

In a recent interview, Lei said it had invested 66 companies around the eco-chain, mainly in the four areas of smart hardware, software, Internet services and content. Millet investment and acquisition of companies include well-known Cheetah Mobile, see more, nine health care, Kay and so on. And if add lei own investment company, will be far more than this number, including UC, Thunder, YY and other well-known internet companies.

Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have controlled the development of China's technology industry for more than 10 years using Internet services. Millet is relying on its hardware base to become the most powerful competitor in this pattern.