Lei Jun was not interested in Tencent QQ, but tried to buy NetEase

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A few days ago, Lei Jun’s head of the Xiaomi group gave the 2022 edition of his annual speech. During the speech, he detailed a lot of the company’s plans for the future and also worked to demystify some rumors. The chairman recounted how he accumulated experience from Kingsoft WPS and Pangu Software, lost to Microsoft in 1996, became an “Internet Addicted Teen”, became a moderator in BBS, and finally embarked on Xiaomi’s road. According to him, the rumors about the Tencent QQ acquisition are wrong.

Lei Jun clarified that there was no such thing as someone on the Internet saying that Tencent QQ asked him to see acquisitions. He clarified that “Ma Yun and Ma Huateng asked him to invest in the Alibaba group. In fact, the only thing that he revealed, was the possibility of investing in NetEase. At that time, NetEase had just one year of existence and was a hosting state for personal websites. Lei Jun offered 10 million Yuan to acquire it, however, Ding Lei refused. Since then, NetEase raised from a $10 million valuation to $500 million which left Lei Jun shocked. After the acquisition failed, Lei Jun decided to do it himself.

Lei Jun details the story of Joyo

Back in 2020, Joyo.com was officially launched. Lei Jun decided to build an online book and audio-visual store. The executive’s previous experience in selling goods in the store and his continuous accumulation of retail understanding were used. Within two or three years, Joyo.com became the largest B2C e-commerce company at that time. However, due to the financial crisis and the Internet bubble, the capital market environment wasn’t good. After reluctantly, he had to sell it to Amazon. During that time he avoided seeing old colleagues and buying any of Joyo’s products or services.

In a process of continuous trial and error, Lei Jun saw the truth. Where there may be mistakes, there will be mistakes. Therefore, starting a business does require a little luck and a need clear judgment on the general trend.

This week Xiaomi announced a bunch of important products. For instance, it presented the innovative Xiaomi Cyberone robot, the Mix Fold 2, and Redmi K50 Ultra.