Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi’s IPO at the Hong Kong stock exchange received a lukewarm response with the stock opening nearly 3 per cent lower than the IPO price. But that didn’t take away the cheer from the employees who stand to gain a lot from the company’s public listing.

Among the major gainers is Manu Jain, the only Indian or rather the only non-Chinese in the company’s senior management. Jain holds about 22.88 million shares of Xiaomi, which at the last trading price of about HK$16.5 translates into roughly ₹320 crore.

Manu was awarded stock options in five tranches, the last one being in February this year. His shares have vesting periods ranging from one year to 10 years, which means he can sell a part of his shares right away if he so decides to.

Xiaomi has over 500 employees, a large number of whom have been given ESOPs. However, for most of them the ESOPs get vested only after five years, which means they’ll have to wait before they can reap the benefits of the company’s IPO. Globally, about 7,000 employees have been given ESOPs so far.

The rewards have been well deserving to Jain as India is the largest market for Xiaomi outside of China and also one of the fastest growing. Xiaomi already is the largest smartphone seller in the country. While Jain did not comment on his stock options, he said the company’s journey in India has just begun and that he’s pretty excited about the growth.

“I believe that our journey has just started in India. We are trying to build an entire IoT platform, bringing more and more IoT products in India. If you give us a few years, the entire cool Xiaomi business model will be replicated in India,” Jain said.

“India is probably the fastest-growing smartphone and Internet market in the world. Last year, it became the second-largest smartphone user base in the world after China. We don’t just take products from China, but we customise these products for Indian conditions. We build both hardware and software which is very specific to Indian needs. That is something that our users in India truly appreciate,” Jain said.

At its IPO, Xiaomi sold 2.18 billion shares, making its IPO the largest in the technology sector since Alibaba raised $25 billion in New York in 2014. However, Xiaomi’s IPO valued the firm at about $54 billion, nearly half the $100-billion it had initially hoped for.

“The IPO price of Xiaomi is HK$17, with a valuation of $54.3 billion, which has already become one of the top three IPOs in the history of global technology stocks. Moreover, this is the first example of a weighted voting rights structure with dual-class shares in the Hong Kong capital markets,” said Lei Jun, CEO at Xiaomi. “Our earliest VC investment, which was $5 million at that time, has now earned a return of over 866 times,” he added.

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