Xiaomi founder Lei Jun, known as ‘China’s Steve Jobs’, doubled his net worth to US$25 billion in the past year thanks to 5G: how does he spend it?

Nov 6 , 2020

Lei Jun only became ultra-rich after he came out of “retirement” at 38 to create Xiaomi. Photo: Bloomberg

You may know Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi, as “China’s answer to Steve Jobs” after his success at bringing the first Chinese smart phone to the world. However, few realise that the tech billionaire had a surprisingly humble upbringing.

Lei was born in 1969 in Xiantao, a city in Hubei Province, to a family of teachers. In the 1990s, when admission to tertiary education in China was still low at 27 per cent, Lei left university as a top computer science graduate and joined Kingsoft Corporation as a software developer not long afterwards.

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Xiaomi CEO and founder Lei Jun chats to media on Tiananmen Square ahead of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) in China last year. Photo: Simon Song, SCMP

Whilst working his way up to become CEO at Kingsoft, he was also simultaneously running Joyo.com, an e-commerce company allowing users to download books and files. He eventually made a fortune by selling the site to Amazon in 2004 for US$75 million. As a major shareholder in Kingsoft (14.9 per cent), Lei also got the company listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

After 20 years of hard work, Lei “retired” in 2007, instead becoming a prominent angel investor in China before setting up Xiaomi. Among his investments back then were Vancl.com, a top online clothing retailer in China, UCWeb, a leading mobile internet company, and Lakala, a third party payment company.

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Lei Jun is thought of by many as China’s Steve Jobs, minus the black polo neck. Photo: Reuters

With such an impressive portfolio, Lei really could have decided never to work again. Instead, he let his passions guide him, and by 2010, at the age of 40, he was back in the game. Lei was always interested in producing quality mobile phone products that would be made in China. His entrepreneurial dream came true after releasing MIUI, an Android-based smartphone operating system in August 2010. Over the following decade Xiaomi has since grown in to a US$46 billion empire with more than 100 million active users.

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Lei’s wealth is now estimated at US$25 billion according to the 2020 China Hurun ranking – more than doubling in the past year alone thanks in part to the 5G boom.

So, what does he spend it on? One of the first times we got a glimpse at one of his more extravagant purchases was in 2017, when Lei showed off his US$430,000 Mercedes-Benz S600 on Weibo at the time the company released its new Redmi Note 5A.

Far more extraordinary was his US$750 million investment in the Xiaomi Science and Technology Park. This sprawling Beijing estate sits beside Lenovo and Baidu’s industrial estates in Beijing’s Haidian District – an area home to residents with the highest per capita disposable income in the city.

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After announcing he had bought the land, Lei told those around him he planned to apply the concept of the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) to change the real estate industry. Through strategic partnerships with a group of leading property developers including China Resources Land and Frasers Property, Xiaomi has since been able to enable smart home ecosystems.

“We finally settled in Beijing after being drifters for nine years”, Lei wrote on Weibo in 2019. He aims to leverage the aforementioned “new internet” business model to axe housing prices by a half or a third. If he can pull it off, he’ll likely garner many more fans.

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Xiaomi

Hailing from a family of teachers, tech billionaire Lei Jun now drives a US$430,000 Mercedes-Benz S600 and invested more than US$750 million in the sprawling Xiaomi Science and Technology Park, next to Lenovo and Baidu’s HQs in Beijing’s pricey Haidian District