https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI_(company)
Founded by a Chinese engineering student with a personal aeronautics hobby, based in Shenzhen — he's now a billionaire.
But apart from this, KPIs aside, the Chinese landscape is amazingly scarce innovation-wise. If one has to tout bikesharing as innovation, it sounds like there's not much to brag about. I am puzzled at Kai-Fu Lee's claims, he's not just another VC.
I dunno - I can think of lots of criticisms of China but this isn't one.
Xiaomi believes that in markets where consumer preferences are hard to predict and change rapidly, “flash sales” can help determine which products are likely to be big hits, driving future production.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bigbangdisruption/2014/04/03/bi...
A big contributor to its profitability is its introduction of new products through online pre-order “flash” sales, which is usually a highly anticipated event in the community. At the phone’s introduction, Xiaomi sets a limit to the number of pre-orders possible, which will often sell out in the first hour or even within minutes. After it has taken its initial set of orders, Xiaomi will then work with Foxconn, its ODM, to build phones. This allows the company to receive advance payment from customers while incurring extremely low inventory costs because products are shipped from Foxconn directly to customers. Xiaomi also has very minimal sales and marketing costs because most advertising is done through its social networks.
and
Xiaomi, on the other hand, at launch, sets the consumer price close to the BOM cost, which ensures price competitiveness. At point 2, BOM cost has already declined, Xiaomi limits the availability of devices, and selected device batches are manufactured at the lower BOM cost. At point 3, mass deliveries start when gross margin is high enough, and volume accelerates as BOM cost decreases. At point 4, when consumer price becomes less competitive, they launch an “S” version of the product by upgrading selected components (e.g. engine) and launch at an even lower price. However, at this point, the BOM price has decreased. Overall, the longer product life gives a better lifetime margin.’
https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/xiaomi-mobile-disruptor-fro...
Similarly, the innovation in many of the domains where China is "ahead" of the rest of the world is not in the original idea, but in actually making it work so that it took off. And that doesn't necessarily mean that those Chinese companies were somehow more innovative than companies that tried the same ideas elsewhere, but that the Chinese market valued those ideas more.
I'm actually not sure how many Japanese innovations weren't "just" incremental improvements of some existing idea that were tried in multiple countries but took off the fastest in Japan.
And yet, what evidence does she raise?
"the electronics were assembled in China; almost never were they invented in China"
"paying with your smartphone has become the norm"
"bikeshare firms"
"China has the largest number of unicorns outside the US"
Nothing that would define as innovations. Let's ask ourselves. What consumer innovations has China come up with in the last 40 years that is known worldwide. Think hard. Maybe none? one? Now compare that against Japan in its 40 years rise.