Mainland-born engineer and entrepreneur Ken Xie, who established three computer network security companies in the United States, has found it difficult to expand business in his native country as well as he has in international markets.
'Although I come from China, this market is dominated by local players,' said Xie, the founder and chief executive of California-based network security appliance maker Fortinet. 'Our business in China remains relatively small.'
His mission now is to turn Fortinet, which has over 100,000 corporate customers worldwide, into a local and highly competitive network security systems provider in a market that favours domestic suppliers.
A graduate of Beijing's Tsinghua University, Xie started his first network security company, called SIS, in 1993 while he was studying for his master's degree at Stanford University in the US.
In 1996, he co-founded US network security appliance maker NetScreen Technologies, which was later sold for US$4 billion to larger rival Juniper Networks.
In 2000, he founded Fortinet. It pioneered the so-called unified threat management (UTM) systems market segment and was listed on the Nasdaq stock market in 2009.