Only in 2013 did Kingsoft launch its mobile internet products, of which Clean Master is the flagship. “Three years ago, we were still a traditional PC-based software vendor,” says Zhang. Only a year after it switched to the free-for-all model, it made more revenue than in the old days, he says. Hong-Jiang Zhang (张宏江）, CEO of Kingsoft and formerly chief technology officer for Microsoft’s research and development in Asia Pacific, says Kingsoft’s transformation has progressed at lightning speed. “If the year 2012 was marked by the transformation of Kingsoft into an internet company, then the year 2013 would be the ﬁrst year when we started to transform our core businesses into mobile businesses,” Lei said on March 19 in announcing Kingsoft’s annual financial results. He then moved all its products, which had been designed for use in personal computers, to Android-based mobile phones (which account for nearly 70% of all the world’s smart phones), and is pushing forward in its development of mobile internet apps, including online gaming, a patented office software suite and cloud-based services. He started with a bold gambit: making all its products freely available to users, thereby giving up about 200 million yuan in annual revenue.

Lei returned to Kingsoft as chairman three years ago, after a four-year hiatus from the company, and undertook a complete overhaul. With Clean Master, Kingsoft stands a good chance of becoming one of the rare Chinese internet players to gain a critical foothold in the U.S. Instead the company has been engaged in a long struggle for survival. Lei controls KIS through Hong Kong-listed Kingsoft Corp., a Chinese technology company founded 26 years ago with the promise that it would become China’s Microsoft.

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