Wealth doubles after a year, how does CEO Xiaomi make and spend money?

Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi is often referred to as “the Steve Jobs of China”. Lei was born in 1969 in a family of teachers in Xiantao City, Hubei Province. In the 1990s, when the university pass rate in China was still low at 27%, Lei graduated from university with an honors degree in computer science and soon joined Kingsoft Group, ensuring that position as a software developer.

During his career development and reaching the position of CEO at Kingsoft, he also ran Joyo.com, an e-commerce company that allows users to download books and files. He made a fortune selling his website to Amazon in 2004 for $ 75 million. As a major shareholder of Kingsoft (holding 14.9% of the company’s shares), it is Lei who helped this company successfully list on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

After 20 years of hard work, Lei “retired” in 2007 and became a famous angel investor in China before founding Xiaomi. Among his investments at the time were Vancl.com – China’s leading online clothing retailer, UCWeb – the leading mobile internet company, and Lakala – a third-party payment company.

With such an impressive portfolio, Lei might not need to work anymore. Instead, he let passion “lead the way” and in 2010, at the age of 40, Lei returned to the game. Lei Jun has always been interested in producing high quality mobile phones right here in China. His business dream came true after the release of MIUI, an Android-based smartphone operating system in August 2010. Over the next decade, Xiaomi grew into a 46 billion empire. USD with more than 100 million users.

According to the Hurun 2020 billionaires list of China, Lei currently owns a fortune of 25 billion USD. His fortune more than doubled over the past year thanks to the explosion of 5G technology.

So, how “Steve Jobs of China” is using his assets?

One of the rare times people saw Lei shopping lavishly was in 2017, when he showed off his $ 430,000 Mercedes-Benz S600 on Weibo at the time the company released the new Redmi Note 5A model.

Most notably, his $ 750 million investment in the Xiaomi Science and Technology Park. This vast Beijing estate is located next to the industrial zones of Lenovo and Baidu in Haidian district – the area with the highest concentration of residents with the highest disposable income per capita in the city.

After announcing he bought the land, Lei said he intends to apply the concept of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) to change the real estate industry. Through a strategic partnership with a group of leading real estate developers including China Resources Land and Frasers Property, Xiaomi has been able to develop and implement a smart home ecosystem.

“We finally settled in Beijing after 9 years of drifting,” Lei wrote on Weibo in 2019. He aims to take advantage of the aforementioned “new internet” business model to cut housing prices in half. or one-third of what it is today. If he succeeds, he will surely have a huge fan base.