On July 16, the world's famous market research firm Canalys released the ranking of the mobile phone market in the second quarter. Xiaomi's share of the global smartphone market reached 17%, surpassing Apple to become the second place in the world, with a rapid growth rate of 83% compared with the same period last year. According to Canalys, Xiaomi has completed its business upgrade from challenger to market leader and continues to improve its channel potential to integrate the operator market with the open market. Canalys believes Xiaomi's new goal is to replace Samsung as the world's largest smartphone supplier.

Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, is obviously very excited about this. In his full letter, he pointed out that becoming the second in the world is a major milestone in the history of Xiaomi's development. After five years of painstaking make-up lessons, Xiaomi's product capacity has been greatly improved, opening up the situation and gaining a firm foothold in the high-end market. In the next step, Xiaomi will further consolidate its core competence and be able to truly sit in the second place in the world as soon as possible.

From the perspective of industrial competition, the competition between Xiaomi and Apple in the top three in the world has actually been going on for many quarters. In 2020, Q4, Xiaomi shipped 43.4 million phones worldwide, an increase of 31.5% over the same period last year, surpassing Apple for the first time to return to the third place in the world. Then Q1 in 2021, Apple rose to second place in the world with a market share of 15 per cent, followed by Xiaomi with a share of 14 per cent, with global shipments of 49.4 million units, up 69.1 per cent from a year earlier.

Behind Xiaomi surpassing Apple's competition is actually a technology war.Since the launch of the first high-end flagship Xiaomi 10 series in 2020, Xiaomi has made continuous innovations in core technologies such as imaging, screen, charging, technology and intelligent manufacturing to break through the high-end market. Among them, Xiaomi has released new technologies such as the world's first 100 million pixel camera, GN2 super-bottom main camera and liquid lens in the imaging field, which has become the leader in both high-pixel cameras and large-bottom cameras. Xiaomi is also the pioneer of full-screen mobile phones. last year, it also took the lead in releasing the pre-research technology of "the third generation off-screen camera". In terms of charging technology, Xiaomi is the first in the industry to achieve 200W wired charging and 120W wireless charging, and launched new technologies such as graphene-based lithium ion batteries and second-generation silicon negative batteries; at the same time, Xiaomi is also the pioneer of ceramic materials for mobile phones.

Technological empowerment on the production side is also advancing.The reporter recently confirmed from the company that the first phase of Xiaomi Intelligent Factory has been completed and put into production. It is a smart factory with fully automated production lines and an annual output of millions of high-end smartphones, as well as a large laboratory for pre-research on new processes, new materials, and new technologies, as well as an experimental base for advanced manufacturing equipment and automatic production lines.

The war of technology is easy to say, but it is not always easy to land. From Xiaomi's point of view, the landing path includes at least two points:Huge R & D investment and continuous talent motivation.

According to the reporter, the total investment in research and development of Xiaomi exceeded 10 billion yuan in 2020, and it is expected to increase by another 3040% this year. In early 2021, Xiaomi announced that it would expand its recruitment of engineers in history, recruiting 5000 engineers for the whole year. At the same time, Xiaomi has also launched a number of talent incentives, such as the one million US dollars Award for Technical talents and the Young engineer Award Program. In July this year alone, nearly 700 young Xiaomi engineers were awarded 16.042 million shares of stock incentives. This strategic concept and incentive efforts, whether for mobile phone companies, or for other industries, may bring enlightening significance.