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Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi takes a selfie at the CeBIT in German on March 16, 2015. [Photo by Zhang Fan/Xinhua] |
Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi has been selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People by TIME magazine. He was also described as the "China's smart phone king."
The list also includes other technology professionals, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
"He wears casual shirts and jeans. He sells smart phones, presiding over glitzy, stage managed unveilings of his new products. It's no wonder that Lei Jun, the founder of the Chinese cell-phone maker Xiaomi, is often compared to Steve Jobs. Yet even the late Apple visionary couldn't boast expanding so swiftly within just five years of the company’s founding," said Hannah Beech, TIME’s East Asia bureau chief.
Online sales exceeded 2.1 million within 12 hours during the Xiaomi fans festival earlier this month. The Guinness World Records announced that Xiaomi successfully created a new world record - "the largest sales of mobile phones on a single online platform within 24 hours". Guinness also issued a certificate to the company.
Xiaomi sold 61.1 million mobile phones in 2014, a growth of 227 percent since the previous year. Sales went up 135 percent, from 31.6 billion yuan ($5.1 billion) in 2013 to 74.3 billion yuan ($12 billion) in 2014.
"After another round of financing late last year, Xiaomi was valued at some $46 billion, earning Lei’s company the title of the world's most valuable tech startup. It's paid off for Lei, a multibillionaire who has become one of the richest people in China. But more important, Xiaomi is exactly the sort of disruptive tech company China needs as its economy tries to transition away from low-cost manufacturing," said Beech.
