TIME With... Lei Jun, China's Steve Jobs

Tech magnate Lei Jun founded the ‘Apple of the East.’ He’s also a casualty of Trump’s trade war.

- Charlie Campbell/ Beijing

FROM THE TIME HE WAS A SMALL BOY, LEI JUN strived to get close to technology. Computers obsessed his every waking hour. But in the rural China of the early 1980s, his teacher father’s monthly salary of $7 put a $2,000 Apple II far out of reach. So Lei devised elaborate ways to fiddle with anything high-tech.

He would wait for hours outside his school’s tiny computer lab, hoping to sneak in when a classmate missed his allotted turn. He took odd programing jobs—once working 72 hours straight without sleep—just to use a client’s PC. “I even drew a keyboard on a sheet of paper and spent classes secretly practicing typing, so I could use my time at the computer more efficiently,” Lei says.

Proximity to tech is no longer a problem for Lei, founder and CEO of Xiaomi. His office in the mammoth company’s Beijing headquarters is stacked with smartphones, televisions, fitness trackers, voice-command speakers and air purifiers produced by the technology firm he founded in 2010. Xiaomi’s sleek designs have earned it the nickname the Apple of the East, though its business strategy differs sharply from the Cupertino approach: Xiaomi limits its profit margins on hardware, luring customers with high-spec smartphones that cost a fraction of an Apple or a Samsung equivalent. It then targets profits from additional services like apps, streaming movies and music and gaming.

On July 9, Xiaomi listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, raising $4.7 billion and valuing the firm at $54 billion, an impressive feat after only eight years in operation. Yet the listing was a fraction of the earlier market estimate of $100 billion, which stood to make Lei one of China’s richest men. There are multiple reasons for the lackluster showing, including the question of whether Xiaomi should be judged on its principal smartphone business or its ambitions for expanding online services.