Childhood and Education
Lei Jun was born on December 16, 1969 in Xiantao, Hubei, China. He had a very tough childhood. Both of his parents were teachers. His father always encouraged Lei Jun’s interest in electronics. He later earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Wuhan University.
Kingsoff and other ventures
He became an engineer at Kingsoft in 1992. He rose through the ranks of the company quickly and became the CEO. He had great success during his tenure as the CEO. However, he later resigned due to health issues. He also made lots of investments in various companies.
In 2000, he founded the company Joyo.com, which was an online bookstore. He later sold it to Amazon for $75 million in 2004. He left the company on December 20, 2007.
In 2005, Lei made a $1 million investment in YY. Those shares were worth $129 million when the company became a public company via an initial public offering in 2012.
In 2008, he became the chairman of UCWeb.
Xiaomi
He then wanted to create a company to get a piece of the smartphone market. In 2010, he started the company Xiaomi. This was an interesting time as the market share of Apple and Samsung was increasing while that of Nokia and BlackBerry was diminishing. He wanted the company to become well-known around the world. For this, they first wanted to get into the smartphone market. So he identified an opportunity in the market as the big brands only focused on the high-end spectrum of phones while the lower-end phones were very cheap and not durable. So they decided to produce phones with similar functions to the major phones by using their suppliers but by selling them at a much cheaper price. They first created a customer base so that they could have a solid distribution network.
The company created MIUI to provide more features and a better interface. As Android was not available in China, this led to millions of people using Xiaomi phones. In 2011, the company continued to grow in popularity by launching the Xiaomi Mi1 and later the Mi2. The Mi1 attracted a lot of attention since its debut. With the support of Mobicity, the company captured the technology market in most countries, including the UK and Australia.
Up until that point, Lei had only worked with companies worth about $1 billion, and having that figure in mind, he thought Xiaomi also held a maximum value of $10 billion. But that was a mistake. This was cleared by Russian investor Yuri Milner of DST, who stated that Xiaomi easily had the potential to become a $100 billion company. As much as this was a shock to him, it also made him realize that he was onto something huge.
In 2013, Xiaomi hired Hugo Barra, the Vice President of Product Management for the Android platform at Google. In the same year, Xiaomi managed to gain a lot of acclaim by launching the Smart TV series, and they also released the Mi3. Over time, MIUI has been adopted by other devices and can be used on other phones as well. It also has an APK that makes it simpler for developers to develop.
In 2018, the company debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Present Day
As of today, Xiaomi has a market capitalization of $35.6 billion, making it the 496th most valuable company in the world. In 2022, it had earnings of $41.50 billion. Lei Jun is currently worth $9.3 billion, making him the 214th richest person in the world. He still serves as the CEO of Xiaomi. Xiaomi consistently ranks among the top 5 largest phone makers in the world.
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