Xiaomi founder Lei Jun donates HK$93 million worth of stocks to employees

Xiaomi founder Lei Jun, a businessman often dubbed the “Steve Jobs of China”, recently donated HK$93 million worth of stocks to the employees of his company Kingsoft.

In an internal e-mail distributed to Kingsoft employees on July 7, company chairman Lei said that Kingsoft’s board of directors had agreed to award him four million company shares, worth a total of about 74.28 million yuan (HK$ 93 million), based on his past three years of work.

“Four million shares is worth a considerable amount of money indeed, and I express my sincere thanks [to the board of directors],” Lei wrote in the e-mail. “But I know that this award is not merely my own to accept and recognise…it is also for all of those struggling on the front lines of Kingsoft.”

Lei added that he had put twenty years of his youth into Kingsoft, “loved” the company and had great aspirations for its growth in the upcoming years - particularly as Kingsoft narrows its focus towards “core businesses designed to promote the transformation of the mobile internet”.

Founded in 1988, Kingsoft became a leader in the Chinese tech industry thanks to its widely-used office software, but the company was faced with rampant domestic piracy in the mid 1990s.