Lei Jun (雷军)'s act of giving up is more worth watching than his success

The pivot

Lei Jun (雷军), founder and long-time face of Xiaomi (小米), is doing something unusual: he's deliberately giving things up. After years of building a predictable, high-volume smartphone business that at times outpaced Apple in shipments, Xiaomi posted healthy 2025 results — revenue of 4,572.87 亿元 (≈457.3 billion yuan) and归母净利润 416.43 亿元 (≈41.6 billion yuan) — even as phone income slipped. Instead of treating that stability as the end goal, Lei is reallocating capital and attention toward cars, AI and "embodied intelligence" — nascent bets with far less certainty but much larger potential upside.

The stakes

Smartphones, once Xiaomi's growth engine, now show the limits of scale: phone revenue fell to 1,864 亿元 (≈186.4 billion yuan), down 2.8% year-on-year, while automotive and new businesses reportedly grew more than 200% and the car division topped 1,000 亿元 (over 100 billion yuan). It has been reported that Lei has been shifting resources away from mature product lines and even ceding some roles inside the company to free bandwidth for these new bets. Why gamble when the core business is still profitable? Because growth imagination can atrophy in a stable structure, and founders often fear being locked into a shrinking set of options.

What it means

Xiaomi's move matters beyond one company. Tesla, XPeng (小鹏) and Li Auto (理想) are all placing similar bets on humanoid robots, embodied AI and new human–machine interfaces — turning what was once lab research into a multi‑company industry wager. Geopolitics and trade policy also frame these choices: with U.S. export controls on advanced chips and rising global supply‑chain risk, Chinese firms are motivated to own higher‑value endpoints and software stacks rather than compete only on commodity hardware. Is this courage or necessity? Maybe both.

Lei's current story is not about past triumphs. It's about the art of choosing what to give up to buy the chance at a different future. That choice, more than another hit phone launch, may tell us where Chinese consumer tech is heading next.