The human cost of Xiaomi’s rapid pivot from smartphones to EVs

SINGAPORE - Months before he dropped to the floor in agony while grocery shopping with his young son, Mr Wang Peizhi had stayed up all night frantically preparing Xiaomi Corp’s flagship store for the launch of its first electric vehicle.

Mr Wang’s work had piled up after the company, led by billionaire co-founder Lei Jun, unveiled a bold plan to become the first tech firm to successfully shift to carmaking.

A key part of executing that vision was Xiaomi’s retail network – Mr Wang’s responsibility. To compete with the likes of BYD and Tesla in China’s burgeoning EV market, the company had decided to overhaul its chain of retail outlets by converting stores designed for smartphones into showrooms to feature full-sized sedans and sport utility vehicles.

But during the Covid-19 pandemic, Xiaomi fired around half the staff responsible for the effort, leaving about 10 people, according to a former employee and a current staff member, both of whom worked with Mr Wang.

The small team felt their workload sharply increase at the beginning of 2024, when the company raced to roll out EV stores in time for the launch of its signature SU7 sedan, the people said. Mr Wang worked longer and longer hours as he took on the team’s biggest projects in addition to his duties carrying out routine maintenance on the company’s web of stores, they said.

In the first eight months of the year, Mr Wang worked on at least 267 retail stores, often retrofitting stores with an area for EVs, according to a trove of internal documents, photos and WeChat messages reviewed by Bloomberg News. On Aug 25, less than three days after he collapsed in front of his son, he died of a heart attack at the age of 34.

Local authorities ruled that Mr Wang’s death was not related to his job at Xiaomi. But his widow is convinced that his punishing work schedule contributed to his death.

Mr Wang’s story offers a rare glimpse into the enormous pressure inside China’s tech companies. Staff at several companies told Bloomberg News that overwork – defined by the World Health Organisation as more than 55 hours a week – is prevalent in many top firms. One reason is a renewed urgency to stay competitive in China’s increasingly crowded market, where battles for customers in sectors from EVs to e-commerce are red-hot. Rivalry with the United States in semiconductors and artificial intelligence has also brought the culture to some state-affiliated companies.

Excessive work culture – dubbed “996” for the expectation to be in the office from 9am to 9pm, six days a week – is deeply rooted in China’s tech sector. A decade ago, it was driven by the belief that hard work would reap rewards as rapid economic growth created opportunities, according to global affairs professor Mary Gallagher from the University of Notre Dame. But now it is more about national priorities and a sense of patriotic duty as China competes in chips, AI and EVs.

“These industries that are doing so well – including on export markets – are so important to the confidence that Xi Jinping wants to see in the economy,” said Professor Gallagher, author of Authoritarian Legality In China: Law, Workers And The State. 

“There’s enormous pressure in those places.”

In recent years, China has been gripped by a national debate over the need to improve work-life balance. Social media platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu have been flooded with posts – which are impossible to verify – about long working hours. The topic took on greater importance in recent years following a series of high-profile deaths attributed to overwork, with the ruling Communist Party of China voicing its support for protecting the rights of workers.

In 2021, Chinese authorities opened an investigation into working conditions at e-commerce company PDD Holdings following the death of an employee in her early 20s. The employee collapsed while walking home with colleagues. Her death sparked a social media backlash against PDD and the relentless working schedules expected of its workers. The following year, a content moderator at Bilibili, China’s largest anime streaming site, died of a brain haemorrhage. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.

China’s national labour laws cap standard working time at 44 hours per week. However, employers can negotiate with trade unions and employees to extend that. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show that staff at Chinese companies have worked longer hours in recent years. In 2024, the average workweek totalled 49 hours with no break, up slightly from 47.9 in 2022. (American full-time employees in 2024 worked an average of 43 hours a week, according to a Gallup survey.) 

In 2025, the government released an action plan to “regulate the unwholesome work culture”, pushing provincial governments to take a greater role in preventing excessive hours.

But the problem has not gone away. Alibaba Group Holding’s engineers cancelled vacations and worked through 2025’s Lunar New Year holiday to play catch-up after DeepSeek shocked the global tech industry with its low-cost, powerful AI model in January. PDD, locked in a price war with Alibaba and JD.com, also made some staff cancel their holiday plans during the same period. But it offered overtime bonuses to those who stayed behind to keep their website running, said one employee in Shanghai. Alibaba and PDD did not respond to requests for comment.

In April, Chinese media reported that Xiaomi was requiring employees to work at least 11.5 hours a day, and those who worked less than eight hours were told to submit a formal explanation. Xiaomi did not respond to questions about the media reports. A survey published in 2024 by Chinese job hunting platform Maimai showed that Xiaomi workers averaged 11.5 hours a day, among the longest in the country’s tech industry.

Staff at ByteDance, Meituan and Tencent Holdings all clocked double-digit hours, according to the survey, which did not explain its methodology. In the US, the average workday spanned eight hours and 44 minutes, with just 5 per cent of employees working on weekends, according to data from workforce analytics company ActivTrak. ByteDance declined to comment, while Meituan and Tencent did not respond to questions from Bloomberg News.

Mr Wang’s widow said she did not see her husband often during his final months. “The work took all his time when he was needed as a father, as a husband,” she said, adding that he rarely returned home before 9pm, and even then, his phone kept buzzing with work messages. “Almost every time he came back from work, our son was either already asleep or just about to go to bed.”

One of the last messages Mr Wang sent was a desperate plea for a contractor to work faster.

“What I signed up for was a life or death commitment,” Mr Wang wrote.

“Don’t leave me hanging.” BLOOMBERG