Xiaomi founder and chairman Lei Jun said on his Weibo account that he will livestream from the Beijing Xiaomi Automobile factory laboratory at 8:00 p.m. on February 1. The brief notice, posted on January 31, set off immediate attention in Chinese tech and auto circles because Lei personally will front the event at the company’s manufacturing site.
The decision to stage a factory-lab livestream is significant less for the logistics of a broadcast than for what it signals about Xiaomi’s car ambitions. Lei Jun has steered Xiaomi’s expansion from smartphones into electric vehicles as a founder-led strategic priority, and his visible presence at the factory underlines that Xiaomi sees the automotive project as central to the company’s next growth chapter.
A factory livestream provides a platform to demonstrate engineering progress, production processes, and safety testing in real time — elements that matter to consumers, dealers and investors alike. Chinese tech companies increasingly use live broadcasts to combine marketing with perceived transparency; for a hardware-intensive, capital-heavy business such as carmaking, a well-executed tour can help close the trust gap that often separates high-tech prototypes from mass production.
Yet the move also exposes Xiaomi to immediate scrutiny. The Chinese electric-vehicle market is intensely competitive, with established incumbents and deep-pocketed challengers vying on price, software, battery performance and after-sales service. Prominent executives fronting factory tours invite direct comparison between rhetoric and evidence of production readiness: build quality, supply-chain stability, and certification milestones will quickly become metrics by which the livestream is judged.
For investors and suppliers, Lei’s appearance is a test of momentum. If the broadcast highlights clear timelines, validated safety tests and demonstrable manufacturing capacity, it could shore up confidence and accelerate partnership discussions. If it reveals gaps between ambition and execution, it may intensify questions about capital burn, delivery schedules and Xiaomi’s ability to convert smartphone-level brand equity into durable advantages in the auto sector.
All eyes will be on the livestreamed content rather than the spectacle. Stakeholders will look for concrete details on production capacity, timelines for customer deliveries, software and autonomous-driving capabilities, and how Xiaomi plans to integrate services and after-sales support across a national dealer and charging network. In a crowded market, credibility often matters more than flash — and that credibility will be what Lei Jun is trying to manufacture on camera.