What impressed me most was that from the first day we made our debut, our booth had the heaviest traffic in the entire exhibition area. Because everyone’s first reaction when they saw my product was that they hadn’t expected such a stunning display to come from an unassuming startup in China. That’s when I realized how much attention this industry was getting, and word spread quickly, so more and more people started coming to us. What stands out most in my memory is that, that year, we won CES’s Best Startup award, and it was the first time CES had officially given that award to a Chinese company.

Then we were also shortlisted for that year’s CES BEST OF THE BEST, the top award. We were one of the 6 finalists, but in the end we lost. I remember it clearly—the winner was lab-grown meat. And I thought, compared with that, if they’re solving world hunger, then AR can wait a little longer, right? So that year, we really felt overwhelmed—the recognition our product received overseas gave us tremendous positive feedback and made us feel that what we were doing was valuable, meaningful, absolutely the right thing to do, and something truly rare and precious. That moment really left a deep impression on us: many people had one attitude before they knew us or tried our products, but after trying them, we could see a smile on their faces. We could see that the first thing he would say to us was congratulations. They would feel that, in some ways, you had already delivered an experience—and a product and company overall—that far exceeded their expectations, and that really gave us tremendous positive encouragement.

We believe this is a huge arena, and that today it is still just the very beginning. Our temporary lead may be related to some first-mover advantages and to having made some of the right moves early on, but we still believe that we will face more and more interesting competition in the future. I also encourage this kind of competition, and we believe we have the chance to have the last laugh. We also believe that 5 or 10 years from now, we’ll still be able to say with pride that we have the highest market share in this industry—or, if not number one, we’ll be in the top three.

Although this is a brand-new technology and a brand-new market, we have still built up strong growth momentum. For example, since last year, our share of the overall AR market has been close to 40%, and by Q2 of this year, it was 39-point-something. We can also expect that in the upcoming Q3, with the launch of our new products, our market share will increase further. So, since our product launched last year, XREAL has ranked first in market share in the global AR market last year and in the first half of this year.

First of all, we didn’t originally plan to expand internationally. We thought, “Hey, what if the AR market took off? We had an early start in China, and we became a leader in this market there.” But as we kept going, we realized that our products were also very competitive overseas. Then, in particular, I think in the early days, we received recognition from some particularly good overseas upstream and downstream partners. By chance, I slowly became part of this overseas ecosystem, and then found a step-by-step path to commercialization.

So here, I’m very grateful to Qualcomm, among others. Back then, we wanted to innovate, so we went to Qualcomm to discuss whether these glasses could connect with a phone. But when we approached Qualcomm China, they said no one had ever done this before and that they didn’t think it could be done. So, with no other option, we thought we’d try Qualcomm in the US instead, and we got in touch with Qualcomm’s US headquarters. At the time, the person in charge of Qualcomm XR, Hugo, said, “This is interesting. Let’s start joint debugging right away.” So we immediately took my engineering team to San Diego, and we did joint debugging for two months. For the first time, we made a split device like this work—glasses driven by a mobile phone. This was at the end of 2018, so at MWC after CES in 2019, the Barcelona trade show, we made our first appearance with a complete setup in which the glasses were driven by a mobile phone.

At that time, we also had a very interesting experience: after CES, we had won everyone’s recognition. Then one time, LGU+ in South Korea—one of the top three telecom operators in the country and an LG affiliate—reached out to us, and we showed them this product again. After he saw it, he asked me, “Wait a second. I’ll get our CTO to take a look right away.” Then, after the CTO looked at it, they said, “Will you be here tomorrow? I hope our CEO can see it tomorrow. I’d like the CEO to take a look at this product.” Then I said okay, so I stayed one more day. While the CEO was there, the entire LG Group happened to be having a meeting, and sitting next to him was the CEO of LG Electronics. He quickly showed him this thing and said, “What do you think of this?” They all thought it was very interesting, and I then added that we really hoped this could work with LG Electronics phones so we could exhibit together at MWC. So the leader made the call on the spot and said, “Hey, let’s work together and give this a try.” We immediately flew programmers and engineers from China to South Korea, and everyone worked together on integration and testing for nearly a month. We made it happen perfectly that February: we met in South Korea at the beginning of February, and by the end of February, we were already showcasing it on the world stage.
So in this process, we also received a great deal of praise, and at that moment, more and more carriers were willing to work with us and build mutual trust. Then later, we realized that carrier channels still had a fairly long chain, so we started thinking about whether we could simplify the adaptation process as much as possible and connect directly with consumers. That’s why we developed some very strong online channels, including Amazon, which let us reach overseas consumers directly with our products at almost the lowest cost and in the shortest time. And because consumers, especially in many advanced developed markets, are already somewhat familiar with AR and VR, our conversion in this area became very fast.

What left a deep impression on me was that during one collaboration with a carrier in the UK, their CEO quickly agreed to meet with us. After that meeting, it felt like something we could never have imagined before as a small startup. Then Mark, EE’s CEO at the time and now, saw it and said, “This is great. We definitely need to include this in our marketing campaign.” What left a deep impression on us was that they created an ad, and that ad featured only two devices to showcase EE’s great vision for the future 5G experience. Right, they used our glasses and Samsung phones, and they brought in a Hollywood star named Kevin Bacon to shoot the ad. Over the course of the whole campaign, they spent about £15 million bit by bit, while we did not spend a penny. We were featured for free in this ad, led by a Hollywood star, that became widely known across the UK. I think it’s because we did some things right that, in the process, we gained support from everyone and benefited from that momentum. These are exactly the kinds of things that make cross-border selling so interesting to us. So we work hard to hold ourselves to higher standards, and to work with our overseas customers to innovate together.

One very new insight here is that, before we launched this product, we never expected that in the US, Steam Deck, a very bestselling handheld gaming console, would pair so well with our glasses. We first heard people mention this in Amazon reviews, saying that it could absolutely connect to Steam Deck and that the experience could be great. So we started looking into it and found that, because it is a handheld console, its physical screen is only a little bigger than a phone screen, but it is a portable gaming device you can carry with you and that has built-in controls. With a device like this, if you pair it with our glasses, you instantly get a gaming experience on a screen larger than 200 inches, and that experience is really great. So we started thinking again about how to improve our software experience, so what did we do? We developed our Nebula software for Steam Deck, and we also built a stronger connection with the community. From there, we looked at how our future products can further improve the experience of using handheld gaming devices with our glasses around this type of gaming. This is still the core user scenario with the strongest stickiness and the highest average usage time today.