HIGHLIGHTS: Alain Lam - CFO of Xiaomi

Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody, and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and I'm today, I'm in a particularly good company with the CFO of Xiaomi, Ala Lemma. Hello, Nicola. Thanks for having me. Now, Ala, Xiaomi 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, and how did it all happen? Well, thanks, Nikola. 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 in, April sick on 04/06/2010. 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, that we built, under underneath all of our ecosystem. Right? Mhmm. I think we built a pretty comprehensive, what we call a human times card times home ecosystem, ranging from all your personal devices to all your home devices and now with your mobility solutions. So, that's where we are, but, you know, we've achieved quite a bit, you know, over the last fifteen years. You know, obviously, last year, we have over 450,000,000,000 RMB in terms of sales. And, you know, and we have achieved, you know, pretty good profitability. It's just such an incredible story, so I'm not quite sure even where to stop. 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, operating system on top of the Android ecosystem and then try to, offer it to, smartphones. But, eventually, we decide to get into the smartphone ourselves. Right? And our first smartphone, which we call Xiaomi one, we sold it at, $1.09 $9.09 RMB 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 …