Last month, we reported that the photo-centered startup Meitu was to release a self-portrait smartphone Meitu Kiss targeting at female users. Behind all the camera lens of Meitu there stands a man named Cai Wensheng who is its investor and became the chairman of this company recently. Meitu’s founder, Wu Xinhong, now serves as CEO.
As an angel investor, Cai himself has never really participated in any project he invested in before. The move this time is seen by many as he is dedicated to build a smartphone and mobile Internet business, just like what Lei Jun, co-founder and CEO of Xiaomi, has been doing.
His name is actually not new to most local Internet players. A high school dropout without any phenomenal background, Cai started up his first business from scratch by registering hundreds of thousands of domain names (total estimated value over a hundred million US$). He can’t speak good English, but still sold a navigation site 265.com to Google China. Invested in several hundreds sites, he was once called the king of webmasters. Gradually the young entrepreneur turned to an angel investor. Some familiar startups Cai had invested include Baofeng Player, Falshget Downloads, 58.com, ZCOM, TTG, and CNZZ, from which some were quite a hit.
In a speech he gave last year, Cai claimed that he would only focus on the mobile Internet in the future. He said that “Mobile phone it the future. Two years later your kids would find your mouse and keyboard to be some sort of antiques. Not to mention the market four years later on…”
Insiders had a guess that MeituKisss would follow the model of Xiaomi Phone in that the user base was accumulated from apps, moved on to the devices, and finally integrated into one line. Cai’s comments on the new phone are quite confident, “Our mobile users for Meitu has hit over 100m already, plus the over 300m users on PC, we would be thrilled at the sales number even only 1% of them decided to buy a Meitu phone. ”
Founded in 2008 in Xiamen, Meitu has developed a plenty of photo apps, claiming a total of 200m users and 18m active ones. Meitu Xiuxiu is one of the most popular photo effects apps for the local market, CEO Wu Xinhong once revealed that currently it has reached break even with the advertising revenues.
image credit: sina.com.cn
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