Three high executives, together with president Wang Xiang, are to step down at Xiaomi, as China’s largest smartphone maker battles a success to gross sales and income from the nation’s Covid-19 disruption.
Lu Weibing, who joined the corporate three years in the past to steer its Redmi sub-brand, will change Wang as president. Two co-founders, Hong Feng and Wang Chuan, will step down from every day operations, in line with a be aware despatched to staff by its chair Lei Jun and seen by the Monetary Instances. The transfer leaves Lei as the one co-founder left standing with an operational position within the firm.
“Xiaomi achieved a clean handover of the baton iteration,” mentioned Lei within the inner letter, including that the corporate is “at the moment dealing with many difficulties” however will additional enhance operational effectivity.
The reshuffle got here on the finish of a bruising 12 months for China’s tech sector, which has been reeling from a regulatory clampdown and the results of Covid. Xiaomi has reported three consecutive quarters of falling revenues and income.
The third-largest handset maker globally, behind Apple and Samsung, additionally started to shed 10 per cent of its workforce this week in a number of departments, together with the flagship smartphone enterprise.
Li Chengdong, founding father of Dolphin, a Beijing-based consultancy, mentioned the timing of Xiaomi’s lay-offs was stunning — coming simply as China loosened its zero-Covid coverage and forward of the Chinese language new 12 months interval.
“Xiaomi’s fourth-quarter outcomes may very well be worse than anticipated,” he mentioned, including that the group would hearth such a “giant” variety of staff provided that there was an pressing must “management prices”.
Analysts on the market intelligence supplier TrendForce predicted that Xiaomi would lose market share in international smartphone gross sales within the three months to December, as China’s financial outlook for 2022 darkened and amid falling gross sales in India, which has lengthy been an essential progress market and the place it faces regulatory pressures.
Xiaomi mentioned the job cuts have been a part of “routine personnel optimisation and organisational streamlining”. It added that “lower than 10 per cent of the full workforce” can be affected and it will be “compensated in compliance with native rules”.
The Beijing-based group’s income declined 9.7 per cent to $9.8bn within the three months to September, in contrast with the identical interval in 2021, after gross sales have been hit by softening international demand for smartphones and weak client spending in China. The group’s web revenue plunged almost 60 per cent in the identical interval.
Xiaomi revealed an funding of Rmb10bn ($1.43bn) in electrical car manufacturing final 12 months had contributed to rising analysis and improvement prices, whereas the corporate had but to acquire a licence from regulators for such automobiles.
Its troubles have been mirrored in job cuts at different tech corporations, together with Tencent. At an end-of-year assembly with staff final week, Tencent founder and chief govt Pony Ma hinted the corporate may need to chop underperforming enterprise models, in line with Tencent staff current.
“It was the primary time in years that Pony identified what a tough place Tencent is in,” mentioned a senior programmer who attended the web assembly. “Tencent’s latest lay-offs won’t remedy the issues. The path is unclear.”
