In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Xiaomi CFO: From Smartphones to EVs, Speed to Market and AI
Episode Date: April 22, 2026In this episode of In Good Company, Nicolai Tangen speaks with Alain Lam, CFO of Xiaomi, about the company’s journey from a smartphone startup to a global technology leader spanning smart ...devices, electric vehicles, and AI.Lam shares how Xiaomi’s focus on high-quality products at “honest prices” and its tightly integrated ecosystem have driven rapid growth and innovation. He explains the company’s move into electric vehicles—designing and launching its first car in under three years—and why Xiaomi sees EVs as the next generation of consumer electronics.The conversation also looks ahead to AI-powered manufacturing, humanoid robotics, and a future where phones, homes, and cars are seamlessly connected. Along the way, Lam offers insights on leadership, company culture, and building lasting customer loyalty.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday. The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Oscar Hjelde. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi everybody and welcome to in good company.
I'm Nicola Tangan, the CEO of the Norwegian Soin Well Fund, and I'm in today.
I'm in a particularly good company with the CFO of Ciyomi, Alain.
Hello, Nicola. Thanks for having me.
Now, Ala, Seomi is just an incredible company with phones, cars, humanoids.
You know, we are the lucky owner of more than 1% of the company.
So just tell us.
What do you do?
And how did it all happen?
Well, thanks, Nicola.
Thanks for the question.
And good to be here.
So first of all,
Xiaomi is still a very young company.
We just turned 16.
We were founded on April 6th, 2010.
And since then, we have done a lot, as you mentioned.
But ultimately, I think we think of ourselves
as a global technology company.
Obviously, we have smartphones.
We have a lot of smart devices.
plus recently we have smart electric vehicles,
and we are into manufacturing.
But underlying all of these is our technology,
whether it is our operating system,
our semiconductors, our AI,
I think those are the stuff that we built
underneath all of our ecosystem, right?
I think we built a pretty comprehensive,
what we call a human times car times home ecosystem,
ranging from all your personal devices to haul your home devices
and now with your mobility solutions.
So that's where we are, but we've achieved quite a bit over the last 15 years.
Obviously, last year we have over 450 billion R&B in terms of sales
and we achieve pretty good profitability.
It's just such an incredible story.
So I'm not quite sure even where to stop.
But why don't we just go through it chronologically?
The first product you had, you know, just how did you just how did it start?
We actually started off building the operating system for smartphones.
And that was in 2010 when we founded the company.
We want to do a, you know, an operating system on top of the Android ecosystem
and then try to offer it to smartphones.
But eventually we decided to get,
to the smartphone ourselves.
And our first smartphone, which we called Johnny 1,
we sold it at 199 R&B in China.
And that become a huge success because, you know,
as you remember back in the days,
there were a lot of products out there that were low quality,
but high prices.
How long time did it take you to develop the telephone?
So we launched our first smartphone in 2011,
so one year after we found it.
How is it possible to have such a short cycle time?
Yeah, because at that time, I think,
There is a lot of, you know, the supply chain is obviously quite advanced in China.
But the problem in the market at that time was there was a lot of expensive products with very low quality.
Right.
And the philosophy for the company is that can we do a smartphone that is much better quality and can, you know, and we can offer to users a much more affordable prices.
And that's something that you see permeated in the history of our products, right?
we try to offer very high-quality solutions to our users at affordable prices.
How do you think about your supply chain?
How much of that is Chinese sourced and how much is sourced outside?
Well, I mean, at the beginning, I think there's still a lot of reliance on foreign technologies.
But over the last 15 years, for a smartphone, frankly, most of the content now is localized.
You can find local solutions for that in most of our components.
How much easier is it for you as a firm?
to be fast in product development when you can source everything locally?
It is important because the local, you know, frankly speaking,
if you think about the foreign products,
a lot of them are more standardized solutions off the shell, right?
Whereas the local partners are willing to work with you
developing products that are more customized to what, you know, we want.
And as a result, it's not just faster, but it's also,
our ability to offer much more customized solutions that fits better into our smartphone,
that fits better into what we want.
And as a result, you know, we go to market.
We are able to offer, you know, products to our customers and, you know, offer something
that they really want.
So you are now at Model 17.
You've aligned with the Apple kind of numbers.
You had a setback in 16.
What happened then?
Well, I think there was such a.
big leave between 15 and 17 that we think that it's beyond one generation in terms of
improvement from our Xiaomi 17 to our Xiaomi 15 and hence we name it a Xiaomi 17 you know and
the innovation comes when you look at the smartphone I don't have one with me right now unfortunately
but it offered a back panel right so instead of having a front panel like most most smartphones do
we actually offer the back panel as well so so you can you can use both sides
effectively. And that's something that has proven to be a lot of ground, I mean, very groundbreaking
and a lot of our users like it. How important has the kind of the internet of things or your
connectivity with home appliance has been? It is important because I think in this world, a lot of
our users like intelligent solutions, right? So, you know, think about air conditioners, think about
washing machines, think about refrigerators.
People, mean, the technology
have existed for 30, 50 years, but that hasn't changed for,
you know, for a long time.
Right. So what we offer to our users
is, you know, a smart solution.
Right. Now you can upgrade your software over the
air in your devices, right?
As opposed to buying new machines.
Right. And a lot of our users value that.
Plus, the fact is, can you make your whole, you know,
lifestyle whole ecosystem much smarter by connecting everything together so that they can do things
for you not just using your smartphone as a remote control but smart intelligence solutions that
they understand who you are they understand your behavior and they can try to offer customized
solutions for you every day what are the kind of things that you can offer clients yeah for
example smart lock right and many people now install instead of a traditional lock
a smart lock, right? Not just you can look at, you know, who's outside of your door, who's
delivering stuff to you, you can offer specialized password for people to enter your apartment
so that you don't leak your, you know, secrecy. But also if you interconnect it with other
devices home, for example, when you open your smart lock, your AC will automatically be switched
on, right, that you don't have to do anything extra, right? And those are the smart solutions
that we like to think that our users need and obviously that become very popular featured among our users.
And then you decided to make a car.
Correct. We decided to get into the car industry in 2021.
And then we launched our first car in 2024.
So how is that possible?
So a little bit over less than three years, we launched our first car, we designed it,
and it would build a factory as well. So China's
China Speed.
Tell me about China Speed.
So look, at the beginning, you know, the car industry to us is not that foreign.
Xiaomi as a company has already invested in some of the EB manufacturers in China before.
So we have an experience of seeing them develop, helping them develop over time.
But then we decided to do it ourselves.
And as you know, we've done a lot of due diligence in the industry the moment we decided to get into this industry.
And I think the ultimate solution is, our ultimate conclusion, I should say, is that, you know, if you believe that a car, a EV, right, is going to be another piece of consumer electronics.
And that's something that we have a lot of experience in, whether it is managing the software, hardware integration, whether it is managing the supply chain.
I think those are the stuff that we have experienced working with so many consumer electronics products before.
I mean, obviously, car is a little bit of a different animal because you need to consider about safety.
But, you know, again, I think the supply chain in China has been relatively well-developed on the EB industry.
So as we go into that, I think what we said was, look, can we spend 10 times more investments to build a first car?
I think that's also a very important philosophy as well, is instead of going into all these different directions, making multiple cars, we decided to spend all of our efforts on one single car.
And it's a pretty fast car, right? Because now you set the record for the quickest round on Nuremberg ring last year.
Yeah, look, I think as we look into this car industry, in the EV industry as well, we think that there are certain things that are core to the EV technology.
that we want to own and develop ourselves.
The rest we can have our suppliers work with us on that.
But things like the electric motors is something that we've spent real efforts on.
Things like the, how do you pack the battery, things like smart driving, assisted driving, etc.
Those are the stuff that we spend, you know, a real time on developing our proprietary technology.
The rest of it, I think we can rely on other people to supply us with this, with the industry solution.
How many people do you have in R&D?
At the beginning, probably around 3,000 people to develop the first car,
which is, as you know in this industry, probably 10 times more than other peers
in terms of developing the first car.
Because our chairman has the philosophy that we want to spend, you know,
a lot of efforts initially to catch up with our peers.
Now, you sold 50,000 cars in 30 minutes.
Yeah.
Yeah, because look, I think obviously we are very new entry to the EV business.
But obviously, at the same time, we already have a very established brand in China.
We have a lot of loyal users of our products.
We have over 180 million people in China that are using our smartphones every day.
And at the beginning, when we decided to develop a car, to develop a EV,
a lot of our users saying that, you know, if
Xiaomi wants to make a car, we'll buy it.
Right. So, you know, you know, 20 plus percent
of our initial buyers haven't even test driven the car,
haven't even, you know, seen the car in real life, right?
They just see us launching the car and they put an order.
So that's a testament to the loyal user base
that we've built up. They're a lot of brand,
and they know that we're going to make the best products for them.
How do you get people to love you?
Well, I think it goes back to our philosophy, right?
If you look at our mission, we want to build amazing products with honest prices
to let everyone in the world enjoy a better life for innovative technology.
Right, it's a long sentence, but we want to build amazing products.
We want to offer these products at, you know, what we call honest prices to our users.
And we want to do a global business, right?
And we want to be innovative.
So I think all these stuff are what these things are, all these features are what users really value these days.
And, you know, over time, we've also, you know, make the coolest products.
We make a lot of friends with our users.
We stay engaged with our users, listen to the feedback, and try to change our product based on these feedback.
So those are the stuff that we built a very good report with our users over time.
And that's how they are loyal to our brand.
they know that whenever they walk into our store,
whenever they buy one of Xiaomi products,
they are getting the best pricing possible.
What are the similarities between making a phone and a car?
Some similarities, a lot of differences.
Obviously, if you look at the phone industry,
before 2004, we did not have a first factory,
smartphone factory.
So before that, we were all using, you know, outsourcing it to,
the Foxxon of the world, the BWRD of the world,
and other suppliers to make the phones for us.
So we are more responsible for the design,
for some of the basic technology,
for some of the technology and also for the branding
and the marketing of the products.
For the car business, you know,
we also undertook the task of building
an entire new factory in Beijing, right?
And so that is a new experience for us.
That's our first, you know, real large-scale
that built our own car.
So that's the difference, right?
I think that's the one key difference between,
you know, how we entered into the car business
versus how we entered the smartphone business.
But there's a lot of similarities because increasingly
the software drive the hardware, right, in the EV,
just like they're in the smartphone.
And a lot of it is, you know, in smartphone,
we stack up a lot of chipsets into a very small form factor.
In the car is similar.
We have to stack up a lot of components
and other things into a phone factor.
But increasingly more important, especially in the EV world,
the software becomes very important.
How do you manage battery power?
How do you manage the software to drive the car in a safe manner?
I think those are very important similarities
with the smartphone business.
Obviously, managing the supply chain is also very important.
We have a lot of suppliers that are quite
that are the same between the smartphone business,
as well as the EB business.
And that's why, you know,
that there's a lot of cross collaborations.
I think people trust the engineers of Xiaomi
that we can build something that is world-class
and that is very popular with the users.
How far behind is Europe when it comes to let EVs now?
Look, we still look up to the, you know,
a lot of the OEMs, the traditional OEMs.
We still think that there's a lot of things to learn from them.
The way that they build a brand,
they work, the way that they build the drive train, the way that they give people a real
good driving experience, those are the stuff that we still look up to a lot of the European
OEMs. What we think that they are lacking, number one, I think the smartness of the car.
I think they are trying to implement a lot of the smart features into the car right now, but
I think in that sense, they are probably behind what we are seeing in China right now.
Second is kind of the whole, you know, N EV, the new energy vehicle development, right?
I think that they were, a lot of the focus were on electric at that time, but really I think
when we look at our EV, we call it a smart electric vehicles, right?
And I think that some OEMs may look at electric to, you know, to focus on electric, but less
focus on smart, right?
I think that that's one thing that, you know, our,
the users right now really want,
especially given the Xiaomi advantage
is how do I link it with
all of our ecosystem products?
How do it work better with my smartphones?
How do you work better with my IoT devices?
You know, things like that that I can create
not just a EV,
but also a smart life ecosystem
beyond the EV.
And how long time do you think it would take
the Western brands to catch up on that particular element?
No, I think a lot of people
are learning, right? I think a lot of people are studying how the Chinese development has become
so advanced. We have obviously received quite a lot of European OEMs who've come to visit us,
who come to, you know, want to have experience sharing with us, not just we sharing with them,
but they also share with us. You know, it depends on, you know, how serious they are. And I think,
I think you already seen a couple of the European collaboration with the Chinese players as well.
Right.
So I think that that's going to be helpful in driving the industry forward.
I think it was the CEO of Ford who used your SU7 for a little while.
What did he say about it?
He said he couldn't get rid of it after six months of driving it.
Because he loved it too much.
Apparently.
I haven't spoken with him in person, but based on what he's been saying in public, he loves
our car.
How is the EV market going to develop going forward?
Look, I think the EV penetrations will continue to go, you know, to be higher.
In China is already, new car sales is already 50, 60 percent new energy vehicle, right?
Right. So that's very high already.
But if you look at a lot of the global market, the new EV market is still quite low in terms of penetration.
So I think that, you know, as the infrastructure continue to develop, as people appreciate the smartness, the drivability of these new electric vehicles, I think the penetration will go up.
So when you see European and American producers actually pulling back their EV,
efforts, what do you think about that?
Look, I think, you know, obviously there's a lot of investments that need to go in,
especially for many of the legacy brands, because they need to retool the whole systems
to get an EV done. So, you know, a lot of them are, you know, probably not pushing that
agenda as forward. But, you know, honestly speaking, we don't think.
that they're, you know, we think that that NEP is going to continue to penetrate, you know,
whether the Chinese players are coming in or whether the Europeans and the American players
are developing it themselves, also the, also the Japanese and the Koreans. So, so I actually
think that, you know, the trend will be there longer term, right? There's obviously, you know,
maybe hiccups along the way, but the whole industry, I think, will move forward in this direction
as, you know, sometimes there's a major breakthrough in terms of, you know,
you know, smartness of the vehicles and also the infrastructure. I think, you know,
there are a lot of places whereby the infrastructure is probably not as well developed
in the other markets for the EV market to take off.
Let's move on to robotics and humanoids. What are you doing there?
Have you seen your latest models and it's...
Yeah, look. It's been mind-boggling. We've been doing robotics for
six years now, that that's an investment that we've started making back in 2019, 2020.
But then I think we're beginning to see the inflection point in this market.
A couple, you know, combinations of the hardware getting better, as well as the software getting better,
i.e. AI, you know, that is driving the brain of the robots.
The way that we are thinking,
Xiaomi internally is thinking about it is we are making these humanoid robots
to enhance our own manufacturing capability and efficiency.
We haven't launched any 2C robots.
So all the robots that we are developing,
or the humanoid robots we are developing right now
are used in our own manufacturing scenario.
I think the video already showed that there were two robots
that are working consecutively for three hours.
with a very low margin of error.
So, but still, I think that's a long way to go.
There's a long way to go because, as you know,
and I'm sure that we'll move to AI at some point in this conversation, right?
The AI right now is mostly focusing on, you know,
learning from the text data, from the voice data that we have accumulated for a long, long time.
But then the physical data are still, you know, quite a way behind in terms of the collection
and the interpretation.
So I do think that when you develop the large language model for physical AI,
right now what we're still lacking is a lot of data that don't exist.
Right.
So you have to stimulate it.
You have to find out the use cases and find the corner cases, et cetera, et cetera.
But, you know, the tags and the voice are quite well developed.
Could you tell us about the improvement in the grip functionality?
in your latest model?
Yeah, look, I think if you look at the video
that it shows like the hand is much smaller
than the other versions,
the hand is very similar to a human hand size now, right?
And also the degree of freedom that it offers, right?
I mean, I mean, I think one of the biggest challenge
with the hand is how many degrees of freedoms
do you have in the hand?
And then the second problem that we're trying to solve
is the cooling, right?
It's like a smartphone.
It's like when you use the machines for too long, it gets heated.
Right.
And once it get heated, you know, the consumer electronics rule will say that the performance would degrade.
Right.
So what we're trying to do also is introduce a cooling system that you can, you know,
do some heat management of the hand as well so that it doesn't get overheated while you are doing the stuff,
the work with repetitive.
When do you think you'll have this for consumer?
That's not the focus of
Xiaomi right now, to be honest,
because we actually think that
there is a big space for us to,
because ultimately we do hardware, right?
We do a lot of hardware.
And there's a lot of manufacturing involved.
So we want these humanoid robots to be able to do,
you know, to improve our manufacturing efficiency first.
And maybe to recreate our entire manufacturing processes.
It could be.
But that's already a huge market.
So right now we're not thinking about doing any to see robot at this point in time.
Who do you think will win this race?
It's hard to say, but it's suffice to say that, you know,
if you look at this market right now,
in terms of innovation, in terms of entrepreneurship,
in terms of technology leadership,
there are two big superpowers in the world, right?
the US and China.
So, you know, the winner will come from one of these two places,
but I don't know where yet.
Yeah.
What's next?
Well, I think, I mean, we talk a lot about, you know,
what we've been doing.
I think that the next thing for us is, you know,
continue to develop our AI capabilities.
I think that AI is going to be very important for the next way.
of innovations and it will impact all of our businesses.
How do you use it today in the company?
Well, I mean, I think the simple things are coding, right?
So a lot of our software engineers now use by coding, number one.
Second one is can we improve our sales efficiency?
Can we predict sales better, right, i.e., do I even need to hire and experience sales,
store manager or I can use AI to predict what kind of sales should each store generate
every day, right?
Smart marketing materials, right?
We can use AI to generate the first few draft.
And very importantly, even in the manufacturing process, we've been using AI a lot, right?
So when we talk about our car, we have a big, bigger press, right?
That does the rear floor for the car.
But in terms of the material we use for that,
for that rear floor,
we generated over,
we stimulated over 100 plus formulas
and use AI to predict the performance
of each of these formulas.
And ultimately we picked two to be the material
for that we do, for the gigapress that we do.
Right.
In terms of like, you know,
and in terms of each piece that we manufactured,
they went through an x-ray room
when they take a lot of pictures
and they use
AI to look into that, to see whether they are deflects in the manufacturing process.
Right.
So you don't use humans to do it anymore.
You just use AI to take pictures very quickly.
They can diagnose whether this piece is good or not.
And then you can use AI in terms of material generations and a lot of those things.
So we're using AI in a lot of different areas.
But then there are more to do, I think.
There are more to do going forward.
You've also developed your own language model.
Yes, we just launched it two weeks ago.
So we launched our own large language model two weeks ago and it has performed pretty well.
I mean, if you look at public scoring systems like openrouter.com, you know, you can see that
we have been ranked, you know, very highly on that, on that table.
So we're very glad that, you know, we have a, you know, a large language model that people like
can people use? And at much lower costs than the likes of Claude? Well, I mean, these costs are
never disclosed, publicly disclosed information. So I don't quite know the cause of it, but our
price that we offered are lower than cork, but much higher than the other, you know, models from
China that are being offered. What are the cost advantages you have when it comes to, you
you know, the utilization of these models giving lower energy costs, simpler model structures,
and so on.
We did try to innovate a bit on the infrastructure of the model.
So obviously we have the benefit of seeing how other people do it before, and then we
try to optimize our path.
So in terms of infrastructure, we have done some innovations, although we didn't talk too much
publicly about that.
one. Number two is if you think about the model development right now, I think there's still
a long way to go. The good thing for Xiaomi in a way is I already have a big ecosystem, right,
that we can use to test, we can collect data from those user behavior and we can refine our
model. Last thing is obviously, as you know, that we put it as an open source model. So we're
also trying to invite the best mind globally to help.
improve that model as a result.
What is it going to mean that many of the Chinese models are open source?
Well, I think that's also a different approach, right?
I think different model company will have different approach in terms of how they want
to do an open source or close source.
But I think that our, you know, our open source model is obviously because we want to
invite, you know, we invite, you know, other developers to joinly develop this.
model with us to help our ecosystem become smarter, right?
And then to raise the, you know, experience ceiling of these models.
And also it helps us attract, you know, good talent to help us improve the model as well, right?
Because ultimately, I think if you look at whether it's our car, whether it's our smartphone,
you know, you know, we want to invite other people to join us together so that we can help
improve the ecosystem together as well.
So let's say five, ten years from now when you have integrated, you know, all your
products with the latest AI models and so on.
What is the vision of the world?
What is it going to do like?
As we think about how AI is going to change the world and how do we fit into our own
ecosystem, right?
We think about more in the physical AI world.
right how do we get AI into our phone how do we get AI into our spot appliances how do we get
AI into our car and then how to internet interconnect these things to make users lives are
more efficient much better i think that that's kind of how we see this right uh mean obviously other
people are using AI to serve the code the community the coding community other people are trying to
use AI to make, you know, very useful chat box for the users so that they can, you know,
they can use their chat box to help them, you know, manage the life better.
But for us, for Xiaomi, because we have over, you know, a billion connected devices globally,
we have over 800 million mobile smartphone users globally.
How do we interconnect these devices so that we'll enhance people's productivity,
in the physical AI world.
I think that that's something that we are looking at.
I have to ask you a question about the founder, Leigh Young,
who is kind of considered a mix of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.
How is it to work with him?
Well, Mr. Lay himself is a entrepreneur, zero entrepreneur.
But he's also a product person.
Right.
I think if you look at when we get into the car industry,
we decided that he should be the CEO of the car business
in order to take it forward.
And he will, you know, I think you've seen other interviews of him as well,
that he personally driven 150 different models of car, right, himself.
And take detail notes so that he understand
what's on offered in the market and how can he improve on it.
I mean, I can, you know, I can, you know, I can assure that you can find very few CEOs
that are real dedication, that have this real dedication to start off with this car business.
Right. He makes us like all the management team, like I personally driven 3,000 kilometers
before the first car was launched in our own car just to, again, you know, his philosophy is that you have to understand the product.
you have to love your product before you, you know, before you, you know, you are in this business, right?
He made us all take professional racing car, you know, licenses in order to, you know, to know how to drive properly.
So, so he's, obviously he's a visionary.
He defined the company's culture, but he also tried to, you know, help us, right?
Enhanes our knowledge, not just on the business, but also on the products that we are.
What are the other ways he influences the corporate culture of the company?
Well, I think, look, I mean, he's obviously a very hardworking guy, right?
You know, he work, I mean, people know in China that he works very, very hard.
And that obviously, you know, inspired all of us to follow suit.
Right.
He is a visionary.
I mean, I think he'll consider it visionary.
He's also a very good investor in China.
You know, so I think those.
Those are the stuff that he defined the corporate culture.
What does it mean to work hard in your book?
Look, work hard and work smart, right?
I mean, obviously we have a very, very complicated business, right?
It is not, you know, we are in smartphones, we are in IOTs, we are in car, we have AI, we have
operating system, and we are running our business in over 100-class countries.
We are also in the manufacturing industry, etc.
So there's a lot of things to manage on a day-to-day basis.
So by that already, you can spend a lot of time doing daily jobs.
But at the same time, I think what we need to do is work smart, right, i.e., what are the
priorities, what are the three important things we want to achieve this quarter this month,
as well as this year, right?
And we focus on those three things that matters, right, as opposed to getting immersed into
a lot of, you know, small tasks that may not have much of an impact.
So for the management suit, we are more focusing on what's the most important things
and how do we tackle that on a quarterly basis, on a yearly basis, on a monthly basis,
and on a daily basis.
You mentioned Chinese speed in the beginning.
What's the key to gaining speed?
Well, look, I think is number one is, you know, having the right infrastructure.
If you look at the manufacturing supply chain, you know, in smartphones, in appliances,
also in the EV industry, it's very well developed in China already.
I think that helps any business, any consumer electronics business kickstart very quickly,
number one.
Number two is the amount of innovation and entrepreneurship that is happening here, right?
people are willing to, you know, spend the commitment on innovating stuff as opposed to just
following stuff. And I think the third is really, as you know, people in China do spend a lot of
time working, right, and, you know, at the same time, probably enjoying life at the same time,
but they tend to, you know, spend up more hours, right? I mean, if you, if you spend more hours,
I think, you know, that the investment will pay off at some point.
What are your plans for Europe?
Look, we are already quite strong in Europe in terms of consumer electronics.
Last year, we ranked number three in Europe in terms of smartphone sales.
So we're up there with Apple and Samsung.
Next year, in the second half of next year, we're planning to export our cars into Europe.
So that's going to be a new and big joint venture for us.
A new venture for us, not joint venture.
And so that's going to be a new thing that will happen.
And we are already investing a lot in Europe right now.
As you can see, we have the car raising on newbring.
We also set up a EV research center in Munich this year, last year.
We've, you know, 75 to 100 engineers over there already
developing some of the coolest product.
I mean, we've showcased in Barcelona this march a Vision Grand Tourism
product, which is a concept car that we have, and that's developed by our European team.
Great fun.
How do you personally relax?
Well, look, I did a lot of, you know, many people say working is relaxing,
so I do work quite a lot.
But at the same time, you have to find the right time.
I spend a lot of time reading as well.
I spend a lot of time doing exercise.
What do you read?
All kinds of books.
Research reports, I do like reading research reports on other company.
I do like reading business books.
There are obviously a lot of successful examples
in many of the industries that we are in,
whether it is Apple, whether it's Tesla.
I read a lot of those books.
But at the same time, I try to read a lot of books that, you know, talk about business failures, right?
Why do some companies fail?
And it's something that you always can learn, right?
I think that there's one phase that I really like is history always repeat itself, right?
And so as you read more about these stories, business stories, you know how people can be successful,
and you need to find your own path to success.
But at the same time, you want to avoid the pitfalls that many companies have faced in the past.
Working is relaxing. What does that mean?
Look, I mean, you do need to enjoy your work, I think. It's very important that you need to enjoy what you're doing. You need to enjoy your colleagues, working with your colleagues. You need to enjoy working with other partners. You need to enjoy, you know, understanding what your users need. So those are, I mean, those are, it itself can be, you know, quite enjoyable experience as well as relaxing experience. But,
At the same time, I do spend quite a bit of time running outside.
I'm going to do a half marathon in Beijing this weekend.
So that's something that I would do.
And I think that those are the times that you can think about what happened next,
some of the long-term plans.
But I do also enjoy meeting up with partners, customers, friends,
over a nice meal, having a nice glass of wine.
And that's something that you can learn from them as well.
I do enjoy talking to a lot of, you know, industry people, people from other industry as well.
And every conversation, you try to get a different perspective of, you know, what's important to them.
And you can learn from them about their experience also.
What is your advice to young people?
Look, I think the world is evolving very, very fast.
I do think that having the, you know, having the interest to learn about the latest developments
is very important, right?
I mean, we all talk about AI, right?
How is AI going to change the job market in the future?
How is AI going to change how people are doing things in the future?
I think those are important, right?
And I think that the young people do need to catch up on the latest trends, because if they
don't catch up, then they may face job security issues in the future.
they may not be able to, you know, understand what the next stage of development is going to be.
So I do know, I do think that young people do need to spend time understanding the latest trends.
But at the same time, I think, you know, as I mentioned previously, I do like to read about history.
I do like to read about what other businesses, success or failure, because you can always learn something from history, right?
because there's going to be, you know, history always, as I mentioned before,
history always repeat itself.
So there's something that you can learn.
You know, I think one of our chairman's saying many years ago,
which resonated a lot with me was 99% of the problems,
there was a lot, there's already a solution out there.
You just need to find it.
And maybe with AI you can find it faster enough.
Well, you for sure have found a solution to very many problems.
And big thanks for all your hard work.
we are so happy to be shareholder in your group
and good luck with everything going forward.
Thank you, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
