This story appears in the current issue of Forbes and was reported jointly with Ryan Mac in San Francisco. To find out more about Lei Jun?s wealth, check out this post by Ryan.?
There aren?t many American entrepreneurs who would have the nerve to compare themselves to Steve Jobs and Apple. To find a guy crazy enough to do that, you have to go to China.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Lei Jun, the jeans-and-black-shirt-wearing billionaire founder of Xiaomi, China?s hottest smartphone company. And, if you believe Lei, the next Steve Jobs.
Beijing-based Xiaomi sells an Android smartphone called the MI-One. It?s a high-powered phone based on a dual-core processor from Qualcomm but with a price far lower than many comparably equipped phones sold in China. That combination of raw power and a reasonable price tag has attracted huge attention from Chinese consumers: When the phone went on sale last fall, Xiaomi received 300,000 preorders in the first 34 hours. Less than a year after launch the company has sold more than 3 million MI-Ones and counting. The phone is hot. Red-hot. Apple hot.
Lei, a 43-year-old investor and serial entrepreneur, is the public face of Xiaomi. Like Jobs, he has intense loyal fans?mostly young, male gadget hounds. The company launched an ?annual convention for fans and holds regular user meet-ups that have the feel of religious revivals, where diehard fans sing, cheer and play games. Lei has more than 4 million micro?blog followers in China and spends hours on MiTalk, the Xiaomi chat site, to solicit feedback from users.
In his first big score, Lei sold the online retailer?Joyo.com?to Amazon in 2004 for $75 million. Three years later he listed Kingsoft, an antivirus software firm, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. He?s an investor in both UC Web, which sells a popular mobile browser, and?YY.com, which offers a real-time video app.
Lei founded Xiaomi in 2010 with his friend Lin Bin, a former Microsoft and Google engineer who is now Xiao?mi?s president. The two men, both 43, both married with daughters (Lin has three, Lei two), had spent the previous months dreaming of a high-spec, low-price phone.
Their big idea is to subsidize the cost of the handset by getting buyers to pay more for various services?not unlike the way that Apple iPhone users pay for software from the App Store.
It?s just one more way the company keeps inviting comparisons with Apple. Lei has a love-hate ?relationship when it comes to the comparison. He says Jobs is an inspiration but specifically denies, for instance, copying his dress code, asserting that his casual attire for product launches is simply a plug for his Vancl fashion e-commerce site.
?I was annoyed in the beginning, very annoyed. But I don?t mind anymore,? he says of the comparisons. Associates say he gets a kick out of being dubbed Lei-bu-si, a pun on Qiao-bu-si, Jobs? Chinese name.
Rather remarkably, Lei risks the wrath of Apple fans everywhere by asserting that he can succeed in China in ways that Jobs never could have matched.
?If Jobs had lived in China, I think he could not have succeeded,? Lei said in an interview with FORBES. ?Jobs was a scrupulous perfectionist, while Chinese culture emphasizes the middle path.? In China, he says, ?you also need to make compromises.? That?s a lesson that American companies have had trouble learning:?Witness Google?s departure from mainland China in the face of persistent censorship of search results.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/07/18/xiaomis-lei-jun-chinas-answer-to-steve-jobs/
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