Xiaomi vs Samsung

Lei Jun founded Xiaomi in April 2010 after selling his previous company UCWeb to Alibaba. Lei had studied Steve Jobs intensively — his presentation style, product philosophy, and retail strategy. Xiaomi's first product was MIUI, a custom version of Android. Lei recruited engineers from Google, Microsoft, and Motorola with an unusual pitch: no salary for the first year, equity instead. All accepted. Lei later said that founding Xiaomi at age 40 was terrifying. He did it anyway.

Xiaomi launched its first smartphone in August 2011 at ¥1,999 — approximately $300 — with specifications that matched phones costing twice as much. The initial 100,000 units sold out in three minutes online. Xiaomi's business model inverted the conventional smartphone industry: sell hardware at cost or below, make money on software, services, and accessories. Samsung and Apple's Chinese market shares began declining almost immediately.

Xiaomi went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2018. By this point, the company sold over 200 categories of products through its ecosystem — from smartphones and laptops to rice cookers, air purifiers, electric scooters, and running shoes — all connected through the Xiaomi smart home platform. The company described itself not as a hardware company but as an internet company that happened to make hardware.

Xiaomi announced its entry into the electric vehicle market in March 2021, with Lei Jun personally committing to lead the project. The Xiaomi SU7 electric sedan launched in March 2024 to extraordinary demand — 88,898 orders in the first 24 hours. Apple had spent a decade trying and failing to build a car. Xiaomi did it in three years. By November 2025 — just 19 months after the first delivery — Xiaomi had delivered 500,000 vehicles. The EV business became profitable in Q3 2025, generating a 25.5% gross margin.

Xiaomi reported full-year 2025 revenues of 457.3 billion yuan — up 25% — with adjusted net profit of 39.2 billion yuan, up 43.8%. The SU7 sedan ranked as China's best-selling sedan priced above 200,000 yuan in 2025. The YU7 SUV, launched in June 2025, led the mid-to-large SUV segment for seven consecutive months. The updated SU7 generated over 15,000 confirmed orders within 34 minutes of launch in March 2026. The company that had been dismissed as a cheap Apple knockoff had outsold Ford and GM combined in EVs in 2024 and was preparing to launch international sales in Europe in 2027.

Lee Byung-chul founded Samsung — meaning "three stars" in Korean — in 1938 in Suwon, South Korea as a small trading company selling dried fish, vegetables, and noodles. The company had 40 employees. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Lee expanded into sugar refining, wool, and insurance in the 1940s and 1950s, building Samsung into one of Korea's first major conglomerates — known as a chaebol — through relationships with the postwar South Korean government.

Samsung entered the electronics business in 1969, initially making black-and-white televisions under licence from Japanese manufacturers. The South Korean government's industrial policy actively supported chaebol expansion into strategic industries, providing cheap loans and trade protection. Samsung Electronics grew rapidly by producing consumer electronics for export — initially as an OEM manufacturer for foreign brands. The relationship between Samsung and the South Korean state has remained close and occasionally controversial ever since.

Lee Byung-chul announced Samsung would enter the semiconductor business in 1983 — a decision that Korean banking analysts considered reckless. Samsung had no semiconductor expertise, no technology, and would be competing against Japanese and American companies with decades of advantage. Lee invested $100 million of his personal fortune and sent engineers to study American chip manufacturers. Within a decade, Samsung was the world's largest producer of DRAM memory chips. The bet became one of the most successful industrial strategy decisions in economic history.

Samsung had manufactured components for Apple — processors, displays, and memory — since the original iPhone. In 2010, Samsung launched the Galaxy S smartphone directly competing with the iPhone, while remaining Apple's largest supplier. The two companies spent years simultaneously as each other's biggest customer and biggest competitor. In 2016, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7 to acclaim — until batteries began catching fire. Samsung recalled 2.5 million devices, replaced them, then recalled the replacements when they also caught fire. Airlines banned the Note 7. Samsung permanently discontinued it, writing off $5.3 billion. CEO Lee Jae-yong was arrested on bribery charges months later.

Samsung reported full-year 2025 revenues of KRW 333.6 trillion — approximately $230 billion — and operating profit of KRW 43.6 trillion, up 33% from 2024. The Q4 2025 performance was historic: quarterly revenue of KRW 93.8 trillion and operating profit of KRW 20.1 trillion — tripling year-on-year — driven by surging AI data center demand for memory chips. Samsung's chip division alone generated KRW 16.4 trillion in Q4 operating profit. Samsung had finally received Nvidia approval for its HBM3E high-bandwidth memory chips after lagging behind SK Hynix, and had begun sampling its next-generation HBM4. The company that had started selling dried fish in 1938 was now the world's largest memory chip manufacturer, supplying the AI infrastructure that was remaking the global economy.