Li Xiting (Chinese: 李西廷; pinyin: Lǐ Xītíng; born 1951) is a Chinese-born Singaporean billionaire business magnate and philanthropist. He is the co-founder, president and co-CEO of Mindray, China’s largest medical equipment manufacturer.
Li is the chairman of Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics, a Chinese medical equipment maker. The Shenzen-based company reported revenue of 30.4 billion yuan ($4.5 billion) in 2022. It has more than 16,000 employees around the world and about one-quarter of them are in research and development, according to the company’s website.
Li owns a 29% stake through onshore and offshore vehicles, according to a May 15, 2023 filing and the company’s 2023 first-quarter report.Cash holdings are valued based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.Li Wenmei, a spokesperson for the company, didn’t respond to a request for comment on the net worth calculation.
Biography
Li was born in a rural village of his family name in Dangshan County in Suzhou, Anhui, China in 1951.
Li graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China with a bachelor’s degree in low temperature physics.
Career
Between 1976 and 1987, Li worked as a researcher assisting scholars at institutes in Wuhan, Hubei and France, where he was a visiting scholar at Paris-Sud University in the early 1980s.
Li’s first attempt at entrepreneurship was at Shenzhen Anke High-tech Company in Shenzhen, Guangdong, a partially state-owned enterprise set up by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in the 1980s. The company would arguably become China’s very first home-grown developer of medical devices, and launched the nation’s first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner in 1989.
Li founded medical equipment manufacturer Mindray in Shenzhen 1991 with Xu Hang and Cheng Minghe (成明和).
Li secured Mindray’s first contract, a 360,000-yuan sale, at a medical equipment convention in the 1990s.
Mindray listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2006, raising US$270 million.
In 2016, Li and the other two co-founders of Mindray took the company private in US$1.9 billion deal.
Li moved to Singapore, and became a naturalised citizen in 2018.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was estimated that Li’s net worth was increasing by US$1 billion every month as Mindray’s stock price increased due to high demand for ventilators.
In April 2021, Forbes estimated Li’s net worth to be US$21.5 billion, making him the richest man in Singapore
Milestones
- 1991 Li starts Mindray with business partners.
- 2006 Mindray begins trading publicly in New York.
- 2016 A consortium takes Mindray private.
- 2018 Mindray relists in Shenzhen through an initial public offering.
