Li Wanqiang resigned, the person who knows rice noodles best is gone

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On November 29, Xiaomi Group announced major and intensive personnel changes ( see previous report by Leifeng.com for details ); among them, Xiaomi co-founder and senior vice president Li Wanqiang resigned for personal reasons and was appointed senior consultant.

Li Wanqiang wrote in his circle of friends:

I have officially left Xiaomi. I want to say goodbye and wish Xiaomi a better future. I want to thank Mr. Lei for the journey of nearly 10 years, thank the brothers who fought side by side with me, thank all the media friends and partners for their love and support, and thank the Mi fans from all over the world who have given me advice and encouragement! And my dad got up in the dark at 5 o'clock to cook the pot of millet porridge for the opening of the business. Thank you for these 10 years!

At the same time, Lei Jun also expressed his gratitude to Li Wanqiang in an internal letter, and wished that "Ali can completely let go of himself and live a happy life from now on."

Let’s go back ten years.

At the end of 2009, Li Wanqiang, who had worked at Kingsoft for nearly ten years, wanted to change his career direction. As an "enthusiast", opening a photography studio was his first choice. Lei Jun received a call from Li Wanqiang asking him to resign, and advised him to think carefully and invited him out for dinner. After learning about Li Wanqiang's idea of ​​quitting his job to open a photography studio, Lei Jun smiled and said, "Stop talking nonsense, just follow me. "

In this way, Li Wanqiang, together with Lei Jun, founded Xiaomi Technology in 2010 and became one of the core co-founders of Xiaomi; and the pot of millet porridge they drank to celebrate the opening was cooked by Li Wanqiang's father in the dark at 5 o'clock in the morning.

At the beginning of the establishment, Li Wanqiang led the team to do the overall R&D, design and operation of MIUI from scratch. Later, Li Wanqiang began to be responsible for the establishment of Xiaomi.com, and was fully responsible for the marketing, service, e-commerce, logistics and other businesses of Xiaomi mobile phones. During this period, he also created hot words related to Xiaomi, including F code, Mi Fan Festival, mobile phone control, sense of participation, etc., and was even praised as "the person who understands Mi fans the most."

To some extent, Li Wanqiang became a disruptor in the mobile phone marketing industry at that time. The marketing method of Xiaomi mobile phones he created was imitated by many mobile phone manufacturers, which accelerated the innovation of the marketing method of the mobile phone industry. However, as a pioneer from 0 to 1, only Li Wanqiang himself knows the hardship behind the glamour.

Li Wanqiang once recalled that when he first started Xiaomi.com, he and his colleagues went to Vancl to discuss cooperation. It was raining heavily at the time, and the car happened to be parked across the road. Li Wanqiang and his colleagues, wearing slippers and shorts, had to run wildly in the rain, attracting a lot of onlookers. He said that he felt like a loser at the time and felt really sorry for himself if he couldn't do well.

At the Xiaomi 2 launch event in 2012, Lei Jun performed poorly in the first half of the event due to poor speaker conditions at the launch venue and the lack of headphones. He later recalled, "The reverberation was too mixed and the spotlight was too glaring. I couldn't hear or see anything on the stage and could only speak with my head held high. " Later, Li Wanqiang issued a military order on the incident, and if there was any problem with the speaker again, he would "resign."

Fortunately, this situation did not happen again. Half a year later, at the Xiaomi Mi Fan Festival, Lei Jun and Li Wanqiang made full preparations. The rhythm of the entire press conference was strictly carried out according to the process, and they also specially invited friends from CCTV to assist in the tuning of the whole process.

In 2014, Xiaomi experienced explosive growth and topped the domestic market in the second quarter of that year. Soon after, Li Wanqiang published the book "Sense of Participation", which revealed the secret of Xiaomi's success, namely "sense of participation", and summarized the three-three rule: make hot products, gain fans, and become a self-media. Soon, "Sense of Participation" became a must-read book for the industry to learn about the Xiaomi model, and the three-three rule gradually replaced Lei Jun's seven-word formula for the Internet model of "focus, extreme, word of mouth, and fast".

On the other hand, Xiaomi had secured a financing round valued at US$45 billion at this time, and both Li Wanqiang and Xiaomi were enjoying great success. However, according to some media reports, the relationship between Lei Jun and Li Wanqiang began to become delicate from this time on; it is reported that Xiaomi no longer encouraged the dissemination of "Sense of Participation" within the company.

Around the 11th of November 2014, Li Wanqiang announced that he would go to Silicon Valley for a period of time, and Xiaomi.com was handed over to Lin Bin of Xiaomi. This move was said by the outside world to be a sign that the Chaoshan people wanted to continue their family line; during this period, there were also rumors that "Li Wanqiang will start his own business" and "Li Wanqiang jumped to Meizu". Li Wanqiang refuted all the rumors and reported his daily work on Weibo, saying that he was still in Xiaomi.

In 2015, as the mainstream domestic mobile phone brands were upgrading, Xiaomi's mobile phone shipments slowed down and began to face a new round of challenges - in 2014, Xiaomi sold 61 million mobile phones; in 2015, Xiaomi did not achieve the goal of selling 80 million smartphones. Reflecting on Xiaomi's performance in 2015, Lei Jun said that they would readjust, forget about KPI, return to their original intention, and make the ultimate fever products again.

On the evening of January 4, 2016, Li Wanqiang announced on Weibo that he was "returning to the world." In fact, during the six months of seclusion, he did not go to Silicon Valley, but encountered a mid-life crisis and had to take a vacation to adjust.

To some extent, Li Wanqiang is the one that everyone expected this time, and they believe that he can bring new hope to Xiaomi's mobile phone business. He wrote on Weibo, "Lei Jun has been talking about returning to the original intention recently, and never forgetting why we set out. In my heart, starting over is still for those tears in my eyes! "

However, things did not develop as the outside world thought. After Li Wanqiang returned, he was mainly responsible for the Xiaomi market and Xiaomi Pictures. Regarding Xiaomi's layout of the film and television business, the general view of the outside world at that time was that this move would help enrich the content ecology of Xiaomi's own TV products on the one hand, and on the other hand, it would be an effective way to increase Xiaomi's overall valuation by targeting the future market size of 100 billion. But in the following year or so, Xiaomi Pictures did not create any representative works, and then the business was cut.

Although Lei Jun announced a major personnel restructuring at Xiaomi in November 2017, appointing Li Wanqiang as Xiaomi's brand strategy officer to focus on the company's brand building behind the scenes, he will also serve as a partner of Shunwei Capital to strengthen the collaboration between Xiaomi and Shunwei in the investment field. The daily work of the marketing department will be handled by Liang Feng, the company's vice president of marketing, who will report directly to Lei Jun.

To some extent, with this personnel adjustment, Li Wanqiang began to withdraw from the front line of Xiaomi's marketing and once again stepped behind the scenes; except for the IPO, Li Wanqiang rarely appeared in the public eye in the past two years. These were seen by the outside world as a precursor to Li Wanqiang's resignation.

In fact, Li Wanqiang's departure this time is not surprising. During Li Wanqiang's first retirement, the direction of the mobile phone industry had already changed dramatically. Coupled with the strong rise of competitors, the increased pressure greatly compressed Li Wanqiang's trial and error space. Moreover, in the process of Xiaomi's continuous development, Lei Jun and Li Wanqiang seem to be the driving forces of two dimensions - Lei Jun pays more attention to the platform, and Li Wanqiang pays more attention to the brand; in the long run, it is inevitable that there will be differences between these two leaders who are important to Xiaomi.

In short, Li Wanqiang has spent nearly 10 years witnessing the process of Xiaomi's birth and growth, and played a very important role in it. Now, his story with Xiaomi has come to a successful conclusion.

No matter where Li Wanqiang goes in the future, we wish him all the best.

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