From Intern to VP: Meet Baidu’s 29-Year-Old Boss of Mobile and Cloud Division of $49 Billion Company

August 27, 2013 Leave a comment

From Intern to VP: Meet Baidu’s 29-Year-Old Boss of Mobile

By Lulu Yilun Chen – Aug 25, 2013

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For Baidu, a company where the average age of its 21,000 employees is 26, promoting a 29-year-old to vice president may not seem like a big deal. Mark Zuckerberg, after all, is that age. But Li Mingyuan, who began at the company in 2004 as an intern, last month became the youngest vice president ever of China’s largest search engine. And he’s taking on no small task: head of the mobile and cloud division for a company worth $49 billion.Baidu is betting that Li’s new face will lead the company into the next era as competition heats up with Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding.
“Li Mingyuan has proven to be a person of vision,” said Lucy Zhang, a Beijing-based analyst at Internet consulting group IResearch. “The past strategies that he did have proven to be the right direction that the company needs to head toward.”
Li last week revealed plans to boost Baidu’s mobile market share by providing users access to so-called “lite apps” that don’t need to be downloaded on its mobile search platform. The lite apps are mostly provided by third party developers and now include services for calling cabs, entertainment and health care.
Baidu has about a dozen lite apps and will encourage developers to explore more sectors including finance, said Li. The company will also set up revenue-sharing models with the developers in the future, said Li.
The executive, who isn’t related to Baidu Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robin Li, was the first product manager of Tieba, which was the biggest online forum in China. Li was promoted to senior product marketing manager at the age of 22 and general manager of e-commerce in 2007.
Li graduated from the Communication University of China and holds an MBA from China Europe International Business School.
“Back in 2004, I bumped into Li Mingyuan on the bus one day and he told me, ‘I just joined this company called Baidu,’” said Wang Zheng, a teacher at Communication University of China, who was a student adviser. “Even back then, you could tell that he was very decisive and had a lot going on in his mind.”

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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