Lei Jun

On April 6, 2010, about thirteen people in a modest Zhongguancun office in Beijing marked the founding of their company with a bowl of millet congee. The name they chose, Xiaomi, means millet; the first phone, launched the following year with flagship specifications at about 299 dollars against rivals priced above 600, reportedly sold 300,000 units within hours.¹

Lei Jun is the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive of Xiaomi Corporation, a Beijing-based consumer electronics and internet company that sells smartphones, smart-home and other connected devices, and, since 2024, electric vehicles. Xiaomi sells much of its hardware close to cost and earns money from software, services, and its ecosystem of products. Lei is also chairman of the software company Kingsoft and a co-founder of the venture firm Shunwei Capital.

Background

Lei Jun was born on December 16, 1969, in Xiantao, Hubei Province, China. His father was a teacher. By one widely repeated account, the household lacked reliable electric light in his childhood, and around age ten Lei wired a working lightbulb himself using batteries and a self-made wooden box. He enrolled at Wuhan University to study computer science in 1987. He has said that reading a Chinese translation of "Fire in the Valley," a history of the personal computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, galvanized him to build a first-class company and finish school quickly. He reportedly completed his required credits in two years and received a computer-science degree in 1991. As a student he formed the "Yellow Rose Software Group" and built an early antivirus product that failed against established competitors, his first entrepreneurial setback.² He is married to Zhang Tong and has two children.

Getting started

In 1992 Lei joined Kingsoft as one of its earliest engineers, at age 23, after meeting founder Qiu Bojun, and worked on WPS, a Chinese-language word processor. Kingsoft nearly collapsed in the mid-1990s after its "Pangu Office," released in 1996 to compete with Microsoft Office, sold fewer than ten thousand units. Lei reportedly wrote a resignation letter and took roughly a six-month leave before returning to help ship WPS 97, priced at about a third of Word, which sold around thirteen thousand copies in two months and helped turn the company around. He became Kingsoft's chief executive in 1998, at about age 28, after Lenovo invested and restructured the firm.² Lei has said he turned down financing meetings with Jack Ma, later of Alibaba, and Pony Ma, later of Tencent, and failed to acquire Zhang Xiaolong's Foxmail email client; Zhang later built WeChat at Tencent. In 2000 Lei founded Joyo.com, an early Chinese online retailer, and sold it to Amazon in 2004 for about 75 million dollars, a sale he has called "eternal pain."² He led Kingsoft's Hong Kong IPO in 2007, resigned as its president citing health reasons, and rejoined as chairman in 2011. As an angel investor in the late 2000s he backed mobile browser UCWeb, on which he reportedly realized roughly a thousandfold return when Alibaba acquired it in 2014.

What he built

Lei drew his founding team from Google, Motorola, Microsoft, and Kingsoft. Initial capital of roughly 30 million yuan came from investors including IDG Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and Morningside. The first Xiaomi phone, the Mi 1, launched in 2011 and sold through an online flash sale, the distribution channel the company would rely on in place of advertising.¹ Xiaomi became one of the world's largest smartphone makers by shipment volume and was named to the Fortune Global 500 in 2019. The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2018. In March 2021 Xiaomi announced entry into electric vehicles with a planned investment of about 10 billion dollars over ten years, and in March 2024 it launched its first car, the SU7 sedan, whose pre-orders reportedly exceeded 100,000 within weeks. By 2025 Xiaomi had delivered roughly half a million cumulative electric vehicles and added the YU7 sport-utility vehicle; SU7 sales that year reportedly surpassed China-built Tesla Model 3 deliveries.³ Lei has donated substantial sums to charity, including 1.3 billion yuan to Wuhan University in 2023. He has served as a delegate to China's National People's Congress.

How he operates

Lei has summarized his approach to internet-era business, formulated around 2009, as four principles rendered in English as focus, extreme, word-of-mouth, and speed, and has said that "internet companies run a marathon at a sprinter's pace."¹ He resists the frequent comparison of Xiaomi to Apple, having said the company is "probably more like Amazon's Kindle," selling hardware near cost and monetizing through software, services, and ecosystem products, and he has separately drawn comparisons to Costco.² Rather than claiming deep prior expertise in each category, he has entered smartphones, connected home appliances, and electric vehicles in succession as a fast-following operator, applying the same low-margin, ecosystem-hardware model each time. Xiaomi built community-first distribution through its "Mi Fans" and online flash sales rather than advertising-led marketing. At the company's founding, Lei reportedly turned away a recruited engineer who wanted salary but not equity, saying an employee who did not care about company shares lacked "entrepreneurial spirit."¹

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s Lei remains Xiaomi's most visible public figure, leading its electric-vehicle marketing personally through livestreamed launches and direct social-media engagement. The company is simultaneously a top-tier global smartphone maker, a connected-device ecosystem player, and a fast-growing electric-vehicle maker competing with Tesla and BYD in China. Lei has said in 2025 that he wants Xiaomi's flagship phones measured directly against the iPhone.³

Key facts

• Born in 1969 in Hubei Province, China; earned a computer-science degree from Wuhan University in 1991, reportedly completing the required credits in two years.
• Joined Kingsoft as an early engineer in 1992 and became its chief executive in 1998; later founded Joyo.com and sold it to Amazon in 2004 for about 75 million dollars.
• Co-founded Xiaomi in Beijing on April 6, 2010, with a team of roughly thirteen people; the name means "millet."
• The first Xiaomi phone launched in 2011 at about 299 dollars and reportedly sold 300,000 units within hours.
• Took Xiaomi public in Hong Kong in 2018, then moved the company into electric vehicles from 2021, launching the SU7 sedan in 2024.
• Donated 1.3 billion yuan to Wuhan University in 2023, reported as the largest individual gift the university had received.