WEIBO TALK: Huawei Shows Frustration, Xiaomi Elation

Two of China’s most successful tech companies, Xiaomi and Huawei, took center stage in the microblogging realm over the past week, engaging in a rare direct war of words over their competing products in the nation’s overheated smartphone market. Their online sparring aside, the pair of tech stars also engaged in their own separate globally-focused activities that emphasized attempts by each to become the nation’s first truly international smartphone brand.

Huawei’s media-shy founder Ren Zhengfei traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he gave a rare public speech in which he appealed to the US to accept his company’s products, in remarks chronicled by some of his top deputies on their microblogs. Meantime, several recently recruited member of Xiaomi’s high-profile international team met at the company’s headquarters in Beijing, where they were talking strategy as the company continues its global expansion.

Xiaomi is somewhat like its role model Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), in that anything it says automatically gets much more media attention and creates far bigger consumer buzz than comparable announcements from its rivals. That kind of ability is the envy of many of its competitors, including Huawei, whose own products may be just as good as or even better than Xiaomi’s but get far less attention.

Huawei senior vice president Yu Chengdong was clearly feeling some of that frustration over the past week when he made a microblog post that was critical of Xiaomi’s latest products released earlier this month, including a large-screen smartphone the Mi Note. Huawei released its own new large-screen model, the Ascend Mate 7 around the same time, though it has received far less attention despite getting relatively positive reviews.

Yu starts off the conversation by saying there’s no discernible difference between the resolution on his company’s smartphone screens and those from his rivals, and goes on to directly criticize the poor battery life of rivals including the Mi Note. (microblog post) Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin quickly fires back in a playful tone, saying Yu’s complaints are just a case of “sour grapes” since the Mi Note is selling so much better than the Ascend Mate 7. (microblog post)

What follows is a long series of other microblog posts that see Yu retort with more of his own responses, while Lin is joined in the Xiaomi side of the debate by CEO Lei Jun and vice president Huang Jiangji. While the Xiaomi officials try to keep things relatively light and friendly, Yu’s unhappiness is evident in the tone of his posts. At one point he admits to having a bad temper, and says just the previous night he had an outburst after being informed of a product problem from some of his engineers. (microblog post)

While Yu was venting his frustrations in the online debate, his big boss, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, was on a charm offensive in Davos, where he gave a speech that contained the repeated refrain that his company isn’t a spying arm of Beijing. Washington believes otherwise, and used its concerns to ban Huawei from selling its core networking equipment gear in the US several years ago.

Ren himself doesn’t have a microblog, but 2 of his top deputies, including senior vice president Chen Lifang, were busy summarizing some of their boss’ sentiment on their own accounts. Chen recounts how Ren says America’s greatness lies in its openness, and that Huawei wants to copy that example and show that it’s a friend of the country and not an adversary. (microblog post) Ren humbly concludes by saying that Huawei is just a “little blade of grass” in the big picture, and certainly not a company that will make history.

While Huawei’s Ren and Yu were being quite passionate, several members of Xiaomi’s growing team of international executives were being far more relaxed and playful on their microblogs in between a series of meetings in Beijing. That difference in tone more broadly reflects the varying styles between these 2 companies, with Huawei as a far more serious, old school company versus Xiaomi’s more relaxed, new-kid-on-the-block posture.

Xiaomi’s global sales head Hugo Barra and the more recently arrived Donovan Sung, who was recruited from British song sharing service Spotify late last year, both made a few posts on their microblogs in between the series of meetings among the company’s top international officials in Beijing. Barra revealed that Jai Mani, a former Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) manager who now heads Xiaomi’s India operations, was at the meeting (microblog post). Sung also disclosed the presence of Clemilton Gomes, who joined Xiaomi in September as a top executive at its new Brazilian operations. (microblog post)

There’s not too much discussion in the posts about what was said or done at the meeting, though the executives were clearly all at Xioami’s headquarters to talk global strategy for the year ahead. That’s likely to see Xiaomi roll out more new products in India, which has quickly become its biggest market outside China, and also to take aggressive steps to enter Brazil and other developing markets.