Kingsoft

Kingsoft started in 1988, and programmer Qiu Bojun wrote the WPS word processor for DOS, which became China's dominant office program before Microsoft Office took over in the 1990s. The comeback was WPS Office: a suite that reads and writes Microsoft's file formats, looks almost identical, and costs nothing as long as you can stand the ads. It runs on Windows, Linux, Android and iOS.

Lei Jun joined in 1992, served as CEO until 2007 and founded Xiaomi in 2010, after which he returned as Kingsoft's chairman. The company has since grown into games and cloud services; Kingsoft Cloud listed in the US in 2020.