User:Sux002/Lei Jun

Lei Jun (born 16 December 1969) is a Chinese entrepreneur who is currently the chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Technology Co., Ltd., the deputy to the 13th National People's Congress, the chairman of Beijing Kingsoft Software Co., Ltd. , the vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and an angel investor in mainland China.

Lei Jun graduated from Wuhan University with a bachelor's degree in 1991. After graduation, he joined Kingsoft Corporation in early 1992 and consequently served as the manager of the Beijing Development Department of Kingsoft Corporation, the deputy general manager of Zhuhai Corporation, and the general manager of Beijing Kingsoft Software Corporation. After working in Kingsoft for 16 years, during which time completed Kingsoft's IPO listing, Lei Jun resigned as CEO of Kingsoft On December 20, 2007.

In April 2010, Lei Jun and seven other colleagues jointly founded Xiaomi Technology Co., Ltd. On October 20, Xiaomi mobile phones were officially launched through the official Xiaomi website. In 2018, Xiaomi opened its first Xiaomi stores in the Philippines, France, and Italy, selling smartphones in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden. In the same year, Xiaomi began selling some smart home products in the US through Amazon. On May 3, 2018, Xiaomi officially submitted an IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the name of "Xiaomi Group", and on July 9, 2018, it was listed on the same stock with different rights. On July 23, 2019, Lei Jun sent an internal letter to Xiaomi employees, pointing out that the company was listed on the Fortune Global 500 list, ranking 468th in the world, and became the youngest Fortune 500 company in history. In 2021, Lei Jun announced that Xiaomi will enter the field of new energy vehicle manufacturing.

In terms of education, Lei Jun was hired as an honorary professor by Wuhan University in 1998 and established the "Tengfei Scholarship" at Wuhan University. Later, on the basis of the original "Tengfei" computer scholarship of 140,000 yuan(around 17 thousand USD in 1998), which was established and awarded for eight years, he continued to set up a total amount in his alma mater. The "Lei Jun Computer Scholarship" of Wuhan University, which amounts to 360,000 yuan, is awarded to students who are excellent in both character and study in the School of Computer Science.

In terms of politics, Lei Jun served as a member of the Haidian District Political Consultative Conference for two terms. In 2012, he was elected as a deputy to the Beijing Municipal People's Congress, and in February 2013, he was elected as a deputy to the National People's Congress.

Life

Early life

On December 16, 1969, Lei Jun was born in a family of teachers in Xiantao, Hubei. Lei Jun's academic performance has been excellent since he was a child. In 1987, he was admitted to Wuhan University majoring in computer science with excellent grades. After entering the university, he just caught up with the reform of Wuhan University into a credit system, which let him took only two years to complete the credits required for graduation, and he also got an A+ for his graduation design. Because he took enough credits very early, Lei Jun had more time to study computers during his college years. Computers were very expensive in those days in China. At first, Lei Jun could only use the computers in the computer room of the school, but there were only 15 of them and the time each student can use is fixed, so Lei Jun went to Wuhan Electronic Street to borrow the computer. With his superb computer skill, he helped people on the Electronic Street to solve many problems, and more and more colleagues have started to ask him for help. It gave Lei Jun the opportunity to know more great people, including Wang Quanguo, the later vice president and CIO of Kingsoft. The two started their first cooperation while talking exchanging the knoelwdges of computer technology. At that time in China, domestic piracy was prevalent, and the software had to be prevented from being copied if it wanted to sell for money. Therefore, Lei Jun decided to develop an encryption software Bitlok with Wang Quanguo. They used nights and weekends for research and development, and it took only two weeks to develop the encryption software successfully. As soon as the encryption software was launched, it was known by many people in the industry and became one of the few famous encryption software at that time. After Bitlok became popular, it was besieged by many decryption masters so Lei Jun and the opponent launched a technical offensive and defensive battle. In order to completely convince the opponent, Lei Jun's encryption program has made a total of more than 20 algorithms. When the final upgrade came out, Lei Jun won. After this upgrade, Bitlok has been selling even better than before. Companies such as UFIDA and Kingsoft also came to buy their software. In the end, Lei Jun made millions of dollars in the first pot of gold with bitlok.

When Lei Jun was a senior, he founded a company called Tricolor(三色) with Wang Guoquan and another colleague. After a long period of exploration after the establishment of the company, they found the company's development direction - Hanka(汉卡). The so-called Hanka is an expansion card that solidifies the Chinese character input method and its driver into a read-only memory. Early computers have just entered China. At that time, there was no Chinese interface and Chinese input method, which made it difficult for people who did not understand English to use the computer smoothly. That is the reason why Hanka was born. Through strong skills of the founders, their Hanka was successfully developed and put on the market. However, what they didn't expect was that soon after their Hanka was born, the technology of imitating Hanka was stolen. When other companies made similar products in larger quantities and at lower prices, the Tricolorr company lost its competitiveness. At the same time, there were problems with the management of the company, as each founder owned almost equal shares, resulting in very inefficient back-and-forth discussions for every decision. In the end, under multiple pressures, the Tricolor company was suspended, and Lei Jun's first venture also ushered in a failure. However, On the day that the three-color company became history, Lei Jun was assigned a computer, a printer, a pile of chips and a savings of 4,000 yuan(around 480USD).

Life in Kingston(1992-2007)

Joining Kingsoft

In the early 1990s, after Lei Jun used WPS Hanka, he was shocked by the exquisite interface and powerful functions of WPS. Lei Jun originally planned to buy a set of WPS Hanka, but the price of this Hanka was as high as 2,000 yuan at that time. Lei Jun could only decide to decrypt the WPS and optimize it on the basis of the original version. The version optimized by Lei Jun became the most popular version of WPS at the time. After meeting with Qiu Bojun, the creator of WPS Hanka in 1991, Lei Jun came to work at Kingsoft, the company founded by Qiu. In 1991, Lei Jun first joined Kingsoft Zhuhai headquarters, and soon after Lei Jun returned to Beijing to establish Kingsoft Beijing R&D Center. Under the leadership of Lei Jun, WPS and Kingsoft Office entered a period of rapid development. At that time, the annual sales performance of WPS remained at about 30,000 sets, and the price of each set was more than 2,000 yuan, which brought tens of millions of turnover to Kingsoft.

First Failure

After Lei Jun returned to Beijing, he immediately started the compilation of software called "Pangu"(盘古) with his team. This set of software includes a series of functions such as word processing, spreadsheet, electronic dictionary, business card management, etc. And most importantly, this is software that needs to run under Windows system. In 1993, Microsoft's Windows system began to expand rapidly in China. Lei Jun realized that the Windows system would definitely replace the traditional DOS system, and believed that it was meaningless to continue to develop DOS software under this development trend. Qiu Bojun accepted Lei Jun's suggestion. Since 1993, Jinshan has almost stopped the development of DOS software. However, although the momentum of Windows was very strong at that time, the DOS system was still the mainstream system in China for a long time. Therefore, despite the successful development of "Pangu" in 1995, this highly anticipated product suffered a major failure in the market because it was too advanced for the market that was still dominated by the DOS system. This failure caused Jinshan's turnover in 1995 to drop significantly compared to 1994 (only one-third of that in 1994), and the number of employees dropped from 200 to only20. The whole company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

A Programmer to a Manager

After this failure, Lei Jun offered his resignation to Qiu Bojun but was rejected and Qiu let him rest at home for half a year. During this period, Lei Jun realized that he had to consider market demands more when making software. In November 1996, Lei Jun returned to Jinshan and began to clean up the mess. In 1997, a new version of WPS was released. In 1998, Lenovo injected another $4.5 million into Jinshan, which brought Jinshan back to life.

After Lei Jun returned to the company, he devoted himself to improving the company's marketing system. He began to make up for his marketing knowledge, and he visited a number of media and asked his seniors for advice. In an interview later, he said: "The most important theory given to me by Du Chaohong, general manager of Yinghantong, is to use the way of selling cabbage to sell software." After a difficult transition period, one million sets of software were sold. Lei Jun also gradually changed from a programmer to a marketer and manager.

In the development process of Kingsoft, it faced a very severe market environment. On the one hand, piracy was prevalent in China at that time, and on the other hand, there is an external strong enermy: Microsoft. From 1988 to 1996, Kingsoft developed WPS and monopolized the Chinese word processing market. In 1990, Microsoft developed the Windows version of Word. In 1992, Microsoft entered the Chinese market, but the process was not smooth. On the one hand, because Microsoft had just entered the Chinese market, it did not fully understand the Chinese market environment. On the other hand, Kingsoft had already occupied a monopoly position in China at that time, and its users were very stable. However, the vast majority of users are using pirated Kingsoft software, resulting in a poor profitability of Kingsoft. In the absence of obvious progress in the market, in 1996, Microsoft made a proposal to Kingsoft: The two softwares can read each other's files through their own software middle-layer RIF format, and Microsoft paid Kingsoft a bridge fee on a regular basis every year. Jinshan, whose financial situation is not optimistic, agreed to this proposal. However, Microsoft uses the bridge between WPS and word to continuously convert WPS users into Microsoft Word users. Afterward, Lei Jun once admitted: "We were fooled by Microsoft back then."

Dislocation Competition

In 1996 and 1997, being pressed by Microsoft and rampant piracy, Lei Jun changed Kingsoft's development strategy: to grow itself through areas that Microsoft does not dabble in. In 1996, Kingsoft launched the game software Zhongguancun Apocalypse(中关村启示录) and the video software Kingshan Yingba(金山影霸). In 2003, Kingsoft invested 30 million yuan to develop Jianxia Love Online(剑侠情缘online), which brought more than 100 million income to Kingsoft in the first year of its launch, becoming Kingsoft's main source of income. In 2004, Swordsman Love began to enter overseas markets and achieved excellent results in Southeast Asia, especially in Vietnam. During the public beta, it reached an astonishing number of 200,000 simultaneous online users. At the same time, PowerWord (金山词霸, a translation software)customer base has reached tens of millions, and Kingsoft Internet Security (金山毒霸) has occupied a share of nearly 4 billion US dollars in the global software market, ranking among the top three in the domestic market.

Going Public

After making certain achievements, Kingsoft began to prepare for listing. However, Kingsoft tried five times before finally succeeding. This also earned Lei Jun the title of "the most diligent CEO". The first time was in 1999, when Kingsoft wanted to list in Hong Kong. Due to the impact of the Asian Financial Crisis, the listing was forced to stop; in 2000, Shenzhen began to prepare for the establishment of the Growth Enterprise Market. Lei Jun believed that Jinshan's performance was better than that of Sina and Sohu, which were already listed at that time, and the possibility of listing was very high. However, the collapse of the Nasdaq Internet bubble in the United States led to the shelving of the domestic GEM, and the second listing could only be stopped. In 2002, Lei Jun once again set his sights on the domestic Main Board market, but the Main Board has a requirement that companies must It took three consecutive years of profitability to go public, which led Kingsoft to be very cautious in investment and business strategies, which limited Kingsoft’s development; for the fourth time in 2004, with the rapid development of Kingsoft’s game business, Lei Jun decided to list on Nasdaq in the United States, because Nasdaq was chasing online game stocks at that time, however, the US Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which greatly improved the review standards for listed companies, and Kingsoft failed to go public again. Eventually, in August 2006, Kingsoft obtained a $72 million limelight and was successfully listed on the Hong Kong Main Board in 2007.After Kingsoft's listing, Lei Jun said a word: "As of today, in China, there is no one that faces consumption. Is the general software company of the owner going public? No. Kingsoft is the first.” On the first day of listing, Kingsoft's stock price rose by nearly 40%. In Hong Kong, it received 2.5 times of institutional over-subscription and 12.2 times of retail subscription. The financing on the first day alone was 626.1 million Hong Kong dollars. After the high pressure of 5 consecutive listings, Lei Jun decided to resign and leave Kingsoft.

Returning

By 2010, Lei Jun had entered the investment circle in the three years since he left Kingsoft, and invested in many outstanding companies, including more than a dozen companies such as Duowan Game.com, Vanke Eslite, Lakala, and Xiaomi Technology. But Kingsoft's prospects are not optimistic. In the first three quarters of 2010, Kingsoft's revenue continued to decline, and online game operating revenue fell by 19% year-on-year. In the security field, Kingsoft Internet Security and Kingsoft Internet Shield were both hit hard by 360(a Chinese internet security company). Kingsoft Internet Security's business volume dropped by 16%. Zhou Hongyi also accused Kingsoft of participating in the manufacture and spread of computer viruses, which caused Kingsoft's share price to plummet 12%. Under the constant requests of Qiu, Lei Jun became the CEO of Kingsoft again. After his return, Lei Jun announced that Kingsoft Drugbath would be free across the board. Then Lei Jun chose to cooperate fully with Tencent. As another competitor of 360, Tencent agreed to join forces against 360.

After Lei Jun returned, Jinshan's situation gradually improved. In September 2013, Kingsoft's share price climbed to HK$17.48, and the company's market value exceeded HK$20.6 billion in one fell swoop. This year, Jinshan's share price has been rising all the way, from a low of HK$3.55 to a high of HK$17.68, an increase of nearly 400%, and it has become one of the best-performing stocks on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The rise of Jinshan's share price is mainly due to good financial support. According to the interim performance statement released in 2013, Kingsoft's net profit was about 340 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 71%, and its online games and application software businesses have achieved steady development.

Life in Xiaomi

Found Xiaomi

The investment experience gave Lei Jun a deeper understanding of the Internet, and he also received exceptionally rich returns. His experience as an investor made him keenly aware that the mobile Internet will be a booming field in China and the world.

In order to realize his entrepreneurial dream, he recruited top figures in related industries, including former vice president of Google China Engineering Research Institute Lin Bin (who participated in the creation of Microsoft Asia Engineering Institute and served as engineering director), Zhou Guangping, former senior director of Motorola Beijing R&D Center (in charge of designing "Ming" series mobile phones), Liu De, former director of the Industrial Design Department of University of Science and Technology Beijing, Li Wanqiang, former general manager of Kingsoft Powerword, Huang Jiangji, former development director of Microsoft China Academy of Engineering, and Hong Feng, former senior product manager of Google China.

In April 2010, in Room 807, Yingu Building, Baofu Temple Bridge, Zhongguancun, Beijing, after Leijun and his colleagues drank a bowl of millet porridge, Xiaomi Technology was officially established(Xiaomi means millet in Chinese).In August of the same year, the first beta version of MIUI was released, it is one of the few customized mobile operating systems in China based on Android. On August 16, 2011, Xiaomi mobile phone 1 was released. The CPU uses a Qualcomm 1.5GHz dual-core processor, the screen is a Sharp 4-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 480x854, and the main frequency reaches 1.5Ghz. Support 32GB memory card, equipped with 4GB ROM and 1GB RAM as auxiliary. The price was 1999 yuan, and almost all mobile phones in China at that time cost more than 4,000 to 5,000 yuan. The emergence of Xiaomi has changed the Chinese mobile phone market where knockoffs and counterfeit products emerge in an endless stream. By 2013, there were more than 10 million MIUI users worldwide. In 2014, Xiaomi's annual cumulative sales surged to 60 million units, a miracle in the industry. In 2015, the growth rate of Xiaomi's sales began to slow down, but the cumulative sales of Xiaomi's mobile phone 4 still broke the 10 million mark. So far, Xiaomi has monopolized 15% of the country's smartphone market, becoming the largest mobile phone brand in China. At the same time, in addition to the field of smartphones, Xiaomi began to issue bonds in other related fields, including but not limited to smartwatches, tablet computers, TVs, smart homes, and various accessories.

Fierce Competition

The Chinese smartphone market began to enter a stage of intense competition around 2015. Xiaomi maintained a good market share with low prices, but problems began to emerge gradually. From an internal point of view, although the low-price strategy helped Xiaomi win a large number of markets in the early stage, shortcomings existed: first, the meager profit has kept Xiaomi’s capital chain in a tight state; second, the profit margin is too small, which means that there is almost no room for the price reduction, which makes Xiaomi's ability to bear the risk of inventory backlog almost zero. The exposed phenomenon is that Xiaomi's mobile phone seems to be out of stock forever. Lei Jun began to be criticized more and more times by the outside world; in addition, the low-price strategy made Xiaomi more and more synonymous with low-end, and Xiaomi's brand image was getting worse. From the outside, the strategy of focusing on the online market was very effective in the early stage, but with the gradual maturity of online shopping and the follow-up of other brand network channels, Xiaomi's online advantages are gradually disappearing; At the same time, the user group of smartphones is gradually expanding from young people to all age groups including middle-aged and elderly people, and the offline market is returning to the public's attention -- the offline market is a major shortcoming of Xiaomi. On the contrary, some consumers, especially the middle-aged and elderly groups, boycotted the market due to counterfeit goods and other reasons— the offline market is a major shortcoming of Xiaomi, additionally, the online market is due to fake goods and other reasons. It was boycotted by some consumers, especially the middle-aged and elderly groups.

Faced with such a predicament, Lei Jun decided to independent Xiaomi's Redmi brand. The products of the Redmi brand continue to be cost-effective, while Xiaomi has begun to compete in the high-end mobile phone market, directly competing with high-end brands such as Apple, Huawei, and Samsung.In February 2020, Xiaomi's first high-end products, Xiaomi Mi 10 and 10pro, were unveiled, priced from 3999 to 4999. As of November 2020, the sales volume of Xiaomi Mi 10 has exceeded 8 million. The high price of 3999 did not stop the enthusiasm of consumers. In December 2020, Xiaomi Mi 11 was released, and on March 21, Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro and Ultra were released, and the price of Xiaomi mobile phones reached 7,000 yuan.

Follow-up development

On July 9, 2018, Xiaomi was officially listed on the main board of Hong Kong with the stock code 1810. This is the first company in Hong Kong with the same shares and different rights. Xiaomi's opening price was HK$16.6, down 2.35% from the issue price. Based on the opening price, Xiaomi’s market value exceeds 52 billion US dollars, and it is the first listed stock in Hong Kong with the “same share with different rights”

On the evening of March 30, Xiaomi Group announced that the company's board of directors officially approved the establishment of the smart electric vehicle business. The company plans to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to be responsible for the smart electric vehicle business. The initial investment is 10 billion yuan, and the investment is expected to be 10 billion US dollars (about 65.7 billion yuan) in the next 10 years. Lei Jun will also serve as CEO of smart electric vehicle business.Lei Jun said, "This is the last major entrepreneurial project in my life. I know what it means to make a decision, and I am willing to put all my accumulated achievements and reputation in my life to fight for Xiaomi Auto".

On August 2, 2021, Lei Jun said on social media that Xiaomi Group ranked 338th on the Fortune Global 500 list, a significant increase of 84 places compared to the previous year which is the "Top 500 Fastest-Progressing Companies in the Global Internet and Retail Industry" in the list.Fortune believes that Xiaomi Group's ranking has risen by 84 places compared with last year, and it is the largest Internet company in China and the United States. According to data from Canalys, in the second quarter of this year, Xiaomi's mobile phone sales surpassed Apple's, and became the world's second-largest smartphone maker for the first time.

Evaluations

Contribution to Internet and Technolodgy

Lei Jun has made indelible contributions to China's technology and the Internet. Kingsoft's WPS is the enlightenment software for the first generation of computer users in China, and now WPS is still serving many Chinese and overseas users, and it is a strong competitor of Microsoft office. In terms of mobile phones, the low price of Xiaomi makes the fake and shoddy smartphones in China gradually disappear. The existence of Xiaomi makes most people use cheap and easy-to-use mobile phones, and its impact is self-evident. Fudan premium Fund of Management said that "Lei Jun led Xiaomi and pioneered the use of Internet thinking to build a mobile phone ecosystem, establishing a business model of "hardware + new retail + Internet services", using the efficiency and user experience of the Internet to promote the rapid popularization and quality improvement of smartphones in China, thus It has promoted the development of my country's mobile Internet industry and driven the transformation and upgrading of traditional manufacturing industries."

Contribution to Environment Crisis

In the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the National People's Congress in 2022, Lei Jun submitted four proposals to the conference which are focused on the carbon footprint accounting system of new energy vehicles and the in-depth participation of private enterprises in social welfare and charity. He suggested building a new energy vehicle carbon footprint accounting system, including establishing a systematic carbon footprint management system to guide the low-carbon development of the new energy vehicle industry as a whole; the second is to formulate carbon footprint accounting standards and methods for the entire industry chain of new energy vehicles; the third is to establish a new Energy vehicle carbon footprint industry data platform; Fourth, improve carbon footprint certification, rating and incentive mechanism. In terms of accelerating the construction of high-power and fast-charging infrastructure for new energy vehicles, he proposed to strengthen policy guidance, coordinate and promote the planning and layout of high-power fast-charging networks; establish a national-level innovation cooperation platform and strengthen joint research on core technologies. And strengthen the construction service guarantee, and promote the popularization of high-power charging infrastructure. Finally, in order to strengthen the recycling of electronic waste, he said that China needs to formulate a medium and long-term development plan for the recycling of electronic waste; vigorously cultivate market players, strengthen coordinated and standardized development; ensure the security of personal data and information, improve the recycling rate of electronic waste; and strengthen propaganda and guidance to carry out a pilot program of personal e-waste carbon credits.

In July 2020, Xiaomi has published its 2020 Sustainability Report, which details its approach and practice in this area of activity. The 30-page report details Xiaomi's range of sustainability initiatives, including environmental protection, corporate social responsibility and sustainable supply chain management. The report also provides information on Xiaomi's commitment to accessibility, data security and user privacy. The report covers China and overseas markets to document how Xiaomi's sustainability plans are implemented globally.The report describes how Xiaomi has incorporated environmental protection into its product designs. For example, the Mi 60T and Mi 10T Pro series packs have a 10% reduction in plastic consumption. By the end of 2021, Xiaomi plans to reduce the amount of plastic in the packaging of its new products in Europe. The report also highlights that there are more than 40 different equipment options for added energy savings. Reports show that Xiaomi products fully comply with all environmental and safety regulations in the countries in which they are sold. The company's products comply with EU regulations, including CE, REACH, RoHS and WEEE directives.

Xiaomi emphasizes the key role of innovation in sustainable development and solving global problems. For example, as part of Xiaomi's commitment to contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the company has become a partner in developing an earthquake early warning system. In China, and soon in other countries with earthquake zones, Xiaomi smartphones equipped with MIUI (version 11 and later) and Mi TV can notify consumers within seconds of an earthquake. These alerts provide information about the nearest emergency shelter, emergency contact details, medical contacts and emergency information to assist you in a critical situation. In 2020, Xiaomi MIUI Earthquake Alert detected a total of 4,0 earthquakes above 29 on the Richter scale, triggering more than 9,400,000 alerts.

In 2020, Xiaomi also played an active role in the fight against COVID-19. In March 2020, it donated tens of thousands of FFP3 masks to the Italian government, helping residents of the hard-hit Veneto region. It also donated 1,000 smartphones to the Spanish Ministry of Education and distributed to children across the country when schools in Europe had to suspend classes and go online. The Beijing-based Xiaomi Foundation has transferred medical supplies to 5,9 countries including Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Myanmar. The donation is worth RMB 8.54 million.