Lei Jun

Lei Jun (雷军, pinyin: Léi Jūn), born December 16, 1969 in Xiantao, Hubei province, is a Chinese technology entrepreneur, investor, and one of the most prominent business figures in China's consumer-internet and consumer-electronics industries. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Xiaomi Corporation (HKEX: 1810), which he established in April 2010 in Beijing as a smartphone maker and which has since grown into a diversified consumer-electronics, internet-of-things, electric-vehicle, and humanoid-robotics conglomerate. Before founding Xiaomi he led Kingsoft, the Beijing software company where he had begun his career in 1992 and which he took public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as chief executive officer in 2007, and he co-founded Joyo.com, the online bookseller sold to Amazon in 2004 for $75 million.

At a glance

• Education: Bachelor of Science in computer science, Wuhan University (1987 to 1991).
• Current role: Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Xiaomi Corporation since April 2010; direct sponsor of the Xiaomi Robotics humanoid and quadruped programs.
• Notable prior affiliations: Engineer (1992), then Chief Executive Officer (1998 to 2007) and Chairman (2011 onward) of Kingsoft (HKEX: 3888); Co-founder and Chairman of Joyo.com (2000 to 2004); Founder and Chairman of Shunwei Capital (2011 onward); Chairman of UCWeb (2008 to 2014).
• Key contributions: Founding and scaling Xiaomi from a four-person Beijing startup in April 2010 into a Fortune Global 500 consumer-electronics company with HKEX-listed status from July 2018; the Xiaomi SU7 electric-vehicle launch in March 2024; sponsorship of the CyberDog (2021), CyberOne (2022), and successor robotics platforms.
• Weibo: @雷军, the verified founder account with approximately 24 million followers as of 2024 and one of the most-followed Chinese-business-executive accounts on the platform.
• X / Twitter: @leijun
• Recognition: Forbes Businessman of the Year (2014); TIME 100 Most Influential People (2015); China Charity Award; National People's Congress deputy from 2013.

Origins

Lei Jun (雷军) was born on December 16, 1969 in Xiantao (仙桃市), a county-level city in central Hubei province. His parents were both schoolteachers; his father reportedly earned the equivalent of about $7 per month during Lei's childhood. He developed an early interest in electronics, building a working electric lamp as a child and continuing electronics-and-computing experimentation through his secondary education at Mianyang High School in Hubei, which he completed in 1987.

He entered Wuhan University (武汉大学) in 1987 and pursued a Bachelor of Science in computer science, graduating in 1991. The university, one of China's top-tier institutions and located in the provincial capital of Hubei, has produced a substantial share of the Chinese internet-and-software entrepreneurship cohort, and Lei's professional network has remained partially anchored in the Wuhan-and-Hubei alumni community through his subsequent career. During his undergraduate years he reportedly read Silicon Valley founder biographies that shaped his framing of the technology entrepreneur as a vocation, a framing that recurs in his later public communications.

Career

After graduating from Wuhan University in 1991, Lei joined Kingsoft (金山软件) in Beijing in 1992 as a software engineer. Kingsoft had been founded in 1988 by Qiu Bojun (求伯君) in Shenzhen as a Chinese-language office-software company, with the WPS word processor as its flagship product. WPS competed with Microsoft Office in the Chinese market through the 1990s and 2000s and remained the dominant Chinese-language productivity suite during the period before Microsoft Office gained widespread piracy-driven distribution.

Lei rose through Kingsoft's engineering and product organisations through the 1990s, leading several of the company's product lines, and was named chief executive officer in 1998 after Qiu transitioned to a chairman role. Lenovo invested $4.5 million in Kingsoft the same year, providing the capital base for Kingsoft's expansion beyond office software into anti-virus, gaming, and dictionary products. Lei led Kingsoft through its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in October 2007 (HKEX: 3888) as chief executive, and resigned the operating role on December 20, 2007 citing health reasons, retaining a non-executive presence on the company's board.

During and after his Kingsoft tenure Lei built a parallel career as an angel investor and entrepreneur. He co-founded Joyo.com (卓越网) in 2000 as an online bookseller, building it into one of the leading Chinese e-commerce sites of the early 2000s, and sold the company to Amazon in 2004 for $75 million in what became the largest Chinese internet acquisition by a US company at the time. He made an early angel investment in YY (now JOYY Inc.) of approximately $1 million in 2005, which was reportedly worth $129 million at YY's 2012 NASDAQ initial public offering. He took the chairman role at UCWeb in 2008 alongside He Xiaopeng and Yu Yongfu, holding the position through Alibaba's June 2014 acquisition of UCWeb. He returned to Kingsoft as chairman in July 2011.

Lei founded Xiaomi Corporation (小米集团) in April 2010 in Beijing with seven co-founders, including former Google China engineering executive Lin Bin (林斌) and former Microsoft Asia-Pacific research-and-engineering executive Hong Feng (洪锋). The company's initial product was MIUI, an Android-based custom mobile operating system that targeted Chinese smartphone users with deeper localisation than the stock Android distribution provided. The first Xiaomi-branded smartphone, the Mi 1, launched in August 2011 and established the company's commercial framing of high-specification smartphones at materially lower prices than the established Chinese and international competitors.

Xiaomi grew rapidly through the 2010s on the smartphone product line and diversified into adjacent consumer-electronics categories, including laptops, smart TVs, smart-home appliances, wearables, and audio devices. The company's "Xiaomi IoT platform" became one of the largest consumer-electronics IoT ecosystems globally, connecting more than 800 million active devices by late 2025. Xiaomi completed its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on July 9, 2018 (HKEX: 1810), raising approximately $4.7 billion at a $54 billion valuation. The listing was the first to use the dual-class-share structure permitted under the HKEX's 2018 listing-rule reforms and was the largest technology IPO globally between 2014 and 2018.

The robotics program began with the CyberDog quadruped robot, launched in August 2021 at Lei's annual Xiaomi product event. The CyberDog was positioned at a price point of approximately RMB 9,999 (around $1,500), competitive with the Unitree quadrupeds of the time. The CyberOne bipedal humanoid was unveiled in August 2022 at the same annual product event, with Lei personally introducing the platform on stage and demonstrating it handing him a flower. The CyberOne specifications: 1.77 metres tall, approximately 52 kilograms, 21 degrees of freedom. CyberDog 2 followed in 2023 with mechanical and AI-stack improvements over the original.

The Xiaomi SU7 electric-vehicle launch in March 2024 was the most-prominent corporate moment of Lei's career as a public figure. The SU7 sedan, unveiled at a Beijing event on March 28, 2024 with executives from Nio, XPeng, Li Auto, Great Wall, and BAIC in attendance, received over 88,000 pre-orders within 24 hours and over 248,000 confirmed orders by the end of 2024. Xiaomi delivered approximately 150,000 SU7 units in 2024 and the SU7 Ultra performance variant followed in February 2025. The EV launch coincided with Lei's emergence as one of the most prominent Chinese-business-executive online celebrities, with his Weibo account reaching approximately 24 million followers and his Douyin account approaching 36 million followers by January 2025, the largest social-media following of any major Chinese technology chief executive.

Lei's net worth was reported by Forbes at approximately $42.6 billion in May 2025, placing him in the global top 35 and making him among the wealthiest Chinese technology entrepreneurs. He has been a deputy to the National People's Congress since 2013, has donated over RMB 16 billion (approximately $2.2 billion) to charitable causes by 2021, and named Forbes Businessman of the Year for 2014 and TIME 100 Most Influential People for 2015.

Affiliations

• Wuhan University: Bachelor of Science student in computer science, 1987 to 1991.
• Kingsoft: Engineer from 1992; Chief Executive Officer, 1998 to December 2007; Chairman, July 2011 to present.
• Joyo.com: Co-founder and Chairman, 2000 to 2004; sold to Amazon in 2004.
• UCWeb: Chairman, 2008 to June 2014; sold to Alibaba in June 2014.
• Shunwei Capital: Founder and Chairman, 2011 to present.
• Xiaomi Corporation: Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, April 2010 to present.
• National People's Congress: Deputy, 2013 to present.

Notable contributions

• Kingsoft leadership (1998 to 2007 as CEO). Led the Chinese office-software pioneer through its product expansion and 2007 Hong Kong Stock Exchange initial public offering.
• Joyo.com founding and sale (2000 to 2004). Co-founded the online bookseller and sold it to Amazon for $75 million in 2004, then the largest Chinese-internet acquisition by a US company.
• Angel investing track record (mid-2000s onward). Early investments in YY, UCWeb, and other Chinese internet companies established Lei's reputation as one of the leading Chinese angel investors of the period before Xiaomi.
• Xiaomi Corporation founding (April 2010). Founded the consumer-electronics company in Beijing with Lin Bin, Hong Feng, and five other co-founders; built it into one of the largest consumer-electronics IoT ecosystems globally.
• Mi 1 smartphone launch (August 2011). The original Xiaomi-branded smartphone established the company's high-specification-at-lower-price commercial framing.
• Xiaomi HKEX listing (July 9, 2018). Took Xiaomi public at a $54 billion valuation, the largest global technology IPO between 2014 and 2018 and the first under HKEX's dual-class-share rules.
• CyberDog quadruped robot (August 2021). Launched the first Xiaomi quadruped robot at a developer-and-enthusiast price point of approximately RMB 9,999.
• CyberOne humanoid robot (August 2022). Unveiled the first Xiaomi bipedal humanoid platform at the annual product event.
• Xiaomi SU7 launch (March 28, 2024). Launched Xiaomi's first electric vehicle, which received over 248,000 confirmed orders by the end of 2024 and established Xiaomi as a credible EV competitor to XPeng, Nio, Li Auto, and BYD.
• Charitable giving. Over RMB 16 billion in donations by 2021, including substantial contributions to Wuhan University and the Xiaomi Foundation.

Open questions

• Next-generation humanoid platform launch. Xiaomi has not produced a high-visibility humanoid product launch since CyberOne in August 2022, despite the parent company's substantial structural advantages on supply-chain scale, AI capability, and IoT-ecosystem distribution. Whether Lei elevates the humanoid program to a higher-priority public-positioning tier in the 2026 annual product event would be a meaningful strategic signal.
• EV-program crossover into humanoid manufacturing. The Xiaomi SU7 production ramp through 2024 and 2025 built out a vehicle-manufacturing capability that has substantial overlap with humanoid-platform production requirements. Whether the EV-program supply chain and engineering organisation cross over into the humanoid program, mirroring the XPeng Robotics pattern under He Xiaopeng, will be informative for the program's production capability.
• Founder-CEO bandwidth across consumer-electronics, EV, and robotics. Lei's personal involvement spans the smartphone-and-IoT business, the EV launch, the humanoid program, and his public-celebrity-influencer role. Whether the multi-business-line founder-CEO model produces durable strategic alignment across the portfolio, or whether the EV-and-robotics expansion strains the legacy consumer-electronics business, is the central structural question facing Xiaomi's 2026 to 2028 trajectory.
• Public-celebrity model durability. Lei's emergence as one of the most prominent Chinese-technology online celebrities has produced strong marketing-and-distribution benefits for the SU7 launch but also created founder-CEO concentration risk for the company's public communications strategy. Whether the celebrity-founder model sustains through the next product cycle, or whether the strategic positioning broadens to a more-institutional public face, is a watchable open question.

Sources

• Lei Jun Wikipedia entry. Biographical entry covering education, Kingsoft career, the Joyo.com sale, Xiaomi founding and HKEX listing, the SU7 launch, and the National People's Congress role.
• Xiaomi SU7 Wikipedia entry. Coverage of the March 2024 launch event and the 248,000-order figure by end of 2024.
• Meet CyberOne, Xiaomi's new humanoid robot. TechCrunch coverage of the August 2022 CyberOne unveiling at Lei's annual product event.
• Xiaomi founder marks Xiaomi's 15th anniversary with a Weibo post. TechNode coverage of Lei's April 2025 Weibo communication on Xiaomi's anniversary.
• Xiaomi SU7 gets over 248,000 locked-in orders in 9 months. CnEVPost coverage of the 2024 SU7 order book figures.
• The story of Kingsoft, a 'Chinese Microsoft'. Asia Financial historical coverage of Kingsoft and Lei's CEO tenure.
• Why Chinese Entrepreneurs Strive to Be Online Celebrities. The World of Chinese coverage of Lei's online celebrity status and Weibo following.
• Companion profiles: Xiaomi Robotics for the humanoid program, XPeng Robotics and He Xiaopeng for the closest domestic structural analogs, and Tesla AI for the international consumer-electronics-and-EV-parent humanoid analog.