Lei Jun
Lei Jun (雷军) is the founder and CEO of Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, currently the world's third-largest smartphone maker after Samsung and Apple.
Lei usually wears a black shirt and blue jeans like Steve Jobs did, and much of his phone's design shares similarities with Apple products. But the ideas behind his sales and marketing edge are anything but imitative.
"Instead of brandishing phones' high-cost luxury appeal like that Cupertino company," Fast Company wrote in February 2014, Lei "sells them in buzz-generating flash sales at razor-thin margins, then takes advantage of revenue streams provided by software."
Lei demonstrated Xiaomi's ambition to become the biggest cell phone supplier in India within 2 years during China's first World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen in November 2014.
Xiaomi, whose name means "millet" in Chinese, was founded in April 2010 by Lei and his friends in Zhongguancun, Beijing's technology hub, which has been called "China's Silicon Valley." The smartphone company has surpassed Samsung to become China's leading cell phone vendor, claiming 30 percent of the country's market share in the third quarter of this year.
Xiaomi released its first smartphone on August 16, 2011. The company has decided to sell Xiaomi smartphones through a leading electronics retail chain in India.
Xiaomi launched its India operations with online marketplace Flipkart.com last July, selling its phones through flash sales where availability is limited to short timeframes.
