The founder as well as CEO of Xiaomi, Lei Jun has been given a giant bonus of over 636.6 million shares. The payment of the ‘reward’ was confirmed in a regulatory filing made by the company on Wednesday.
Xiaomi had earlier said that it had plans to giving the huge share based bonus to Lei for the contributions he has made to the Chinese smartphone manufacturing company in the past eight years.
On the other hand, Lei has promised that he would be donating the entire bonus shares to charity after taxes are deducted. As per the current price of the stock, the involved 636.6 million shares are worth around $1 billion or 7.54bn Hong Kong dollars. However, the company has not provided information regarding where that amount would go in the filing.
The payment of the bonus comes in after the company went public in Hong Kong last year in July. Since that time, Xiaomi’s stock has decreased amid concerns related to lower demand for smartphones in China. Moreover, the company also faces added competition from rivals such as Apple, Samsung, Oppo, Vivo and Huawei. But still, Lei probably can afford and donate the entire bonus shares to charitable purposes. Despite of accounting for the fallen shares of the company, Lei is worth around $11 billion still, as per the report from Bloomberg and Forbes.