Two Xiaomi Co-Founders Quit Before Anticipated IPO

On April 28, Leijun, CEO of Xiaomi Inc. published an internal letter stating that Zhou Guangping and Huang Jiangji, two co-founders of Xiaomi, have resigned from their positions. According to the letter, the two co-founders “chose a new way of life” for personal reasons and decided to resign from their duties in the company.

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“Xiaomi‘s senior executive committee respect and understand their decisions and want to express our gratitude for their dedication and contribution all these years. We wish them a prosperous future.” The internal letter claimed that Zhou Guangping has laid out an important foundation for the R&D and production of Xiaomi’s smartphones and hailed Huang Jiangji for pioneering many of Xiaomi’s services and strategies including Mi Cloud and IoT Platform. They made an extraordinary contribution to Xiaomi and are responsible for Xiaomi‘s miracles.

Meanwhile, Lei Jun announced in the letter that the CFO of the company, Chew Shou Zi, will take on the additional role of Senior Vice President. Lei stated that since Chew joined Xiaomi in 2015, he has made a great contributions to the development of Xiaomi with his excellent leadership and business management abilities. Lei Jun is looking forward to seeing the influence Chew will have in the company’s finance, investment and human resources areas.

As the data show, Mr. Shou Zi Chew, joined Xiaomi as CFO in July 2015. Before that, Chew worked at DST Global, a venture capital firm founded by the billionaire investor Yuri Milner. The investments he invested in while at DST include Xiaomi, JD.com, Alibaba Group, Didi Chuxing, etc.

The recently resigned Zhou Guangping served in the core expert group at the Motorola headquarter’s design center, he was also senior director and chief engineer at the Motorola’s Beijing R&D Center. After joining Xiaomi, Zhou was in charge of the R&D center as well as the supply chain team for a long time, however, he gradually stepped out of Xiaomi‘s senior executive team since 2015.

Huang Jiangji, also known as KK, joined Xiaomi very early. Graduated from Purdue University for his undergrad, KK worked for Microsoft for almost thirteen years from 1997 to 2010. He had been responsible for MiTalk and served as the strategic vice president at Xiaomi. The team he was leading will now report to Lei Jun directly.