Lei Jun was born in Hubei, China, in 1969, trained as a computer scientist and built his early career at Kingsoft, where he served as chief executive, before founding Xiaomi in 2010 with the ambition of bringing high-specification smartphones to the mass market at deliberately compressed margins.
Xiaomi has since become one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, with a deeply integrated ecosystem of consumer-electronics and smart-home products, and has extended its strategy into electric vehicles with the launch of the SU7 in 2024. Under Lei's leadership the company has combined hardware, software and retail in a way that is widely studied as a counterpoint to both Apple and Samsung.