Manu Kumar Jain

VP & MD, Xiaomi

Bio

Manu Kumar Jain is the Global Vice President of Xiaomi and Managing Director of Xiaomi India. He played a major role in bringing Xiaomi to India and making it a best-selling brand within a few years of launching operations. He was also the co-founder and Managing Director of one of India’s most popular fashion & lifestyle e-commerce portals, Jabong.com.

He was born on 25th January 1981 in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. He holds a B.Tech degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

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Startup Journey & Career Growth

After completion of his B.Tech, Manu started his career as a Senior Associate at Headstrong, where he used to code and develop software solutions for investment banks. He worked there for 2 years and left in May 2005. In 2007, he joined McKinsey & Company as an Engagement Manager and left in December 2011.

In February 2012, he co-founded the fashion ecommerce portal Jabong and took up the role of Managing Director. He grew the company from inception and established Jabong as a leading fashion and lifestyle online retail platform. (Jabong was acquired by Myntra in 2016).

In 2014, Xiaomi offered him the role of Managing Director and gave him the responsibility of bringing Xiaomi to India and starting its business in India. He proved his mettle by making Xiaomi India’s number one smartphone brand in terms of sales. Later, he was promoted as global Vice President of Xiaomi in January 2017.

In between co-founding Jabong and becoming the MD of Xiaomi India, Manu Jain also became a Board Member of a couple of other organizations such as KrazyBee and Hungama.

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Xiaomi Journey

February 2014 - Expansion of the company to India.

April 2014 - Purchased the domain name mi.com for a record US$3.6 million.

October 2014 - Launched Mi PowerBanks, which became an instant hit in India.

December 2014 - Touched a milestone of about 1M phones sold in India.

April 2015 - Ratan Tata acquired a stake in Xiaomi.

August 2015 - The company partnered with Foxconn to bring in the first Made in India phone to the market – The Redmi 2 Prime.

March 2016 - Launched the Redmi Note 3 Pro in India, the first smartphone powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 processor.

April 2016 - Invested in Hungama which also got them an exclusive partnership to deliver content to Mi customers.

July 2017 - The company entered into a patent licensing agreement with Nokia.

December 2017 - It overtook Samsung to become the largest smartphone brand in India.

August 2018 - The company announced POCO as a mid-range smartphone line, first launching in India.

Net Worth

Manu Kumar Jain’s net worth is estimated at around $5 million as of 2020.

Awards and Recognition

Received Businessworld's 40 under 40 award by BW Businessworld in 2018.
Created a Guinness World Record by opening over 500 Mi Stores in one day on 29th October 2018.
Received the Most Promising Business Leader of Asia award at
Economic Times Asian Business Leaders Conclave, Hong Kong in 2019.
Received the Young Global Leader award from the World Economic Forum in 2019.
Received Best CEO (MNC) of the year from Forbes India in 2019.

Recognized as GQ's 50 most influential young Indians in 2019.

Podcast

Manu Kumar Jain, Managing Director of Xiaomi India, walks us through the journey of setting up Xiaomi in India and scaling it to become one of the best mobile phone brands in India in a very capital-efficient way with Anand Daniel, partner at Accel, in the INSIGHTS series podcast.

You can listen to the episode here - ‎SEED TO SCALE Podcast Series by Accel: INSIGHTS #38 — Manu Kumar Jain on scaling Xiaomi and disrupting the India electronics space on Apple Podcasts