5/23,$XIAOMI-W (01810.HK)$The financial report for the first quarter of 2024 was announced. Among them, the smart electric vehicle business was mentioned for the first time. However, since the Xiaomi SU7 was officially released on March 28 and delivery began in April, its revenue was not calculated in the current financial report. However, due to early investment, the current expenses include 2.3 billion yuan for innovative businesses such as smart electric vehicles.

“Starting in the second quarter, Xiaomi will begin publishing some specific data related to the automotive business.” Xiaomi Group management said during the 2024 Q1 earnings call. According to the first quarter financial report, Xiaomi's current R&D expenditure increased 25.4% from 4.1 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2023 to 5.2 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2024, mainly due to increased R&D expenses related to the smart electric vehicle business and other innovative businesses.

The release of the Xiaomi SU7 attracted strong attention from the market, and the Xiaomi Group focused on the current business progress in its financial report. Financial reports show that as of April 30, 2024, the cumulative number of locked orders for the Xiaomi SU7 series reached 88,063 vehicles. As of May 15, 2024, the total number of new Xiaomi SU7 series vehicles delivered reached 10,000.

“In order to meet users' demand for early delivery, our factory is also making every effort to speed up production. We plan to increase production to double shift production in June, and we are confident that we will deliver more than 10,000 units in June and ensure delivery of more than 100,000 units throughout 2024.” Lu Weibing, president of the Xiaomi Group, said, “100,000 units is a guaranteed figure; we need to try to sprint to 120,000 units.”

In terms of sales and service network construction, Xiaomi Auto plans to expand its sales and service network to 219 sales stores, covering 46 cities; 143 service centers, covering 86 cities, basically covering all provinces and cities in mainland China by the end of 2024.

At the same time as increasing production capacity and improving delivery efficiency, the focus of Xiaomi Auto's work has also begun to shift to intelligent driving. On June 18, Lei Jun, chairman of Xiaomi Group, and a group of executives conducted a 3-hour live broadcast from near Shanghai's Century Avenue to the Hangzhou Delivery Center, and used Xiaomi's City Pilot NOA function throughout the process. This is also the first time that Xiaomi Auto has officially publicly tested the city NOA and high-speed NOA.

When talking about smart driving, Lei Jun refuted the rumor that Xiaomi would cooperate with a third party on a visual solution, and reiterated Xiaomi's determination to develop smart driving on its own: “The annual cost of developing smart driving by Xiaomi itself is over 2 billion yuan. The investment is enormous. There are few domestic manufacturers that develop everything themselves from beginning to end.”

“We will open in 8 cities in May and Nationwide (City NOA) in August.” According to Lu Weibing, Xiaomi's core competitiveness in smart driving lies in full-stack self-research. “Xiaomi has a huge advantage in smart driving. We need to complete end-to-end full-stack self-research, which is fundamental to the final victory.”

In the aforementioned live broadcast, Lei Jun called out twice to recruit people and publicly asked if any smart drivers would like to join Xiaomi. On May 23, it was reported that Wang Naiyan, the former CTO of Tucson Future China, will join Xiaomi to report to Ye Hangjun, chairman of the Xiaomi Technical Committee and head of autonomous driving at Xiaomi. There was no official response from Xiaomi to this news.

Editor/Jeffrey