Xiaomi Founder: Don't Call Me "China's Steve Jobs"

Xiaomi founder Lei Jun is frequently dubbed as China’s Steve Jobs. The comparison linking Jun to Apple’s founder stems from numerous factors, including his dress style, leadership approach, vision, and product strategy at Xiaomi. Though seemingly complimentary, Jun, who indeed admires the successful innovator, has expressed discomfort with being continually associated with Jobs. This was conveyed by Lei Jun in an extended blog post published on Xiaomi China’s official blog in October 2013. Jun acknowledged that Jobs was an inspiration to him, but he felt unable to comment when compared with the iPhone creator. “Jobs is a great person. He did brilliant things, changed the world, and was a great inspiration for Xiaomi. However, comparing him with me is entirely inappropriate,” said the businessman, now approximately 56 years old. Jun also emphasised that Xiaomi and Apple are two vastly different companies. For this reason, he was baffled when interviewed about his reaction to being called China’s Steve Jobs. “I really cannot say anything,” said Jun. At that time, three years after Xiaomi was founded in 2010, Jun frequently received questions about “How could Xiaomi become better than Apple or Samsung?”. According to Jun, he could not answer such questions because Xiaomi was still too young. “Xiaomi had been operating for only three years, how could I compare it with global giants like Apple or Samsung,” explained Lei Jun. According to Lei Jun, the use of such terminology contains bias and can lead people to misinterpret the company. For example, when the Wall Street Journal media outlet categorised Xiaomi as a “shanzhai” company—a term meaning counterfeit products. However, when the outlet conducted direct interviews and examined Xiaomi’s business developments, they no longer used that term.