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2020 is an extraordinary place for the field of electric vehicles. With the transformation of many multinational car companies, there are also many Internet companies seeking cross-border finalists. Today, another Internet company, Xiaomi Guan Xuan, entered the field of car building.

Xiaomi Group announced today that the board of directors has formally approved the establishment of a smart electric vehicle business. The company plans to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to take charge of the intelligent electric vehicle business. The initial investment is 10 billion yuan, with an estimated investment of 10 billion US dollars in the next 10 years. Mr. Lei Jun, Chief Executive Officer of the Group, will also serve as the Chief Executive Officer of the smart electric vehicle business.

It may not be surprising that Xiaomi officially announced that it was building a car. After all, rumors about Xiaomi's car building have been heard all the time. In recent months, all kinds of news about Xiaomi's car building has been everywhere, and the stock price has also gone up and down. In December, Xu Jieyun, deputy director of Xiaomi Group's general office, said on Weibo that anyone who said Xiaomi built cars was fake news.

Until February this year, foreign media revealed that "Xiaomi has decided to build a car, Lei Jun personally led the team" rumors. At that time, Xiaomi Group quickly responded: "wait and see, not yet", "later announcement" for more information will not be responded. At this time, the answer is already somewhat intriguing.

On March 25, it was once again revealed that Xiaomi was negotiating with Great Wall Motor to use its factory to produce cars. In response to this report, Fu Xiaokang, vice president of Great Wall Automobile, said: "We will not comment on this matter." In the evening, Great Wall issued an announcement on the cooperation between Xiaomi and Great Wall to build electric cars, saying that the news reports were not true, saying that Great Wall did not negotiate with Xiaomi on the news coverage. Meanwhile, Xu Jieyun, deputy director of Xiaomi Group's general office and former general manager of the group's public relations department, responded to the report on Weibo: "completely bullshit fake news."

However, a few days later, Xiaomi officially announced the construction of a car, which means that the dust of Xiaomi car-building has finally settled!

However, building cars is not an easy task, and Xiaomi has not formed a joint venture with other companies, so how will it build cars? According to a person familiar with the matter, Xiaomi will follow the route of making smartphones, focusing its research and development on vehicle software, while handing over hardware and production to supply chain partners. If Xiaomi and Great Wall officially reach an agreement, it will mean that Great Wall will also provide contract manufacturing services for the first time. At that time, people familiar with the matter expected that the two companies would announce their plans for cooperation as soon as next week.

On the face of it, Xiaomi has not officially joined the carmaker, but it has been actively laying out the automotive sector. Lei Jun expressed interest in electric cars as early as 2013 and went to Silicon Valley to visit Tesla's CEO Musk.

During the development of Xiaomi, the company also applied for many patents in the field of automobile. At the beginning of last year, Xiaomi affiliated company applied for a method and device called "a method and device for automatic recommendation of transmission gears". Enterprise check APP shows that Xiaomi affiliated companies currently own a total of 134 vehicle-related patents, and a number of Xiaomi affiliated companies have registered auto parts as business scope.

At the same time, Lei Jun and Xiaomi Group have made nearly 30 investments in the automotive sector, which makes Lei Jun a star angel investor in the field of new energy vehicles. Obviously, Lei Jun is not fighting an unprepared war.

However, Xiaomi is not the first Internet company to enter into building cars. Previously, Alibaba has jointly built a high-end intelligent pure electric car Zhiji with SAIC and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech, and Baidu and Geely holding Group have set up a joint venture to enter the automobile industry as a vehicle manufacturer. And Geely Automobile Group announced the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent in Hangzhou, Huawei jointly with Changan Automobile, Ningde era to build a new brand of smart cars, and so on, so it is still a great challenge to really gain a foothold in the field of car manufacturing.

Some people in the industry believe that at present, more and more Internet companies have crossed the border into the car-building industry because new cars have become a tuyere and opportunity worth fighting for. In addition to the emergence of new energy around the world, the sentiment of the capital market for smart electric vehicles is also rising, which is also the reason why Lei Jun has made up his mind. After all, in Lei Jun's words: "standing on the tuyere, pigs can fly."

According to the latest financial report for 2020 released by Xiaomi Group, Xiaomi's operating income in 2020 reached 245.866 billion yuan, an increase of 19.45 percent over the same period last year, and after-tax profit reached 20.313 billion yuan, an increase of 101.06 percent over the same period last year.

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