Lei was born in Xiantao, Hubei, China, to two teachers. He studied computer science at Wuhan University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1991. In 1992 he joined the software company Kingsoft as an engineer. He became its chief executive in 1998 and led it to an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2007, then stepped down as president and chief executive in December 2007.
Alongside Kingsoft, Lei built a record as a founder and investor. In 2000 he founded joyo.com, an online retailer he sold to Amazon.com for US$75 million in 2004. In 2005 he put $1 million into YY; those shares were worth $129 million when YY went public in 2012. He became chairman of UCWeb in 2008, co-founded the investment firm Shunwei Capital in 2011 and rejoined Kingsoft as chairman in July 2011.
In 2010 Lei founded Xiaomi with several partners, including former Google executive Lin Bin. Xiaomi listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2018, the first company there to list with weighted voting rights, a structure that gives founders more votes per share. Forbes describes Xiaomi as best known for value-for-money devices; in 2020 it launched the Xiaomi 10 series to push into high-end smartphones.
In March 2021 Lei announced that Xiaomi would make smart electric vehicles, took personal charge of the project and planned to invest 10 billion USD over a decade. Forbes says he called it his last major startup project. Xiaomi unveiled its first car, the SU7, in March 2024, and pre-orders passed 100,000. Lei has also been a deputy to China's National People's Congress since 2013.
In September 2026 The Inference reported that at the launch of an 80,000-unit Xiaomi foldable, Lei conceded that memory is currently expensive. The open question, the story said, is whether LPDDR6 memory spreads from that showcase phone into the PCs, vehicles and edge servers on CXMT's roadmap, and whether Lei gets the wider Chinese component pairing he predicts.
SourcesWritten 16 October 2026
