The enigmatic tycoon guiding Oppo, Vivo, and Pinduoduo

In the early 2000s, BBK Electronics Corporation was at the brink of falling apart as its mainstay audiovisual business dwindled. Under the leadership of founder Duan Yongping, the Chinese consumer electronics firm pivoted to smartphones.

This led BBK through a long, dramatic restructuring that resulted in the creation of Oppo and Vivo, which would become two of the world’s best-selling smartphone brands a decade later.

While the two phonemakers now operate autonomously, their histories are closely intertwined with BBK and Duan is still widely regarded as the man behind their rise.

While Duan retired young 20 years ago at the age of 40, his influence and counsel has helped not just Oppo and Vivo but also other well-known Chinese tech companies such as ecommerce player Pinduoduo and internet firm NetEase.

An enigmatic group

Despite consistently being named as one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, BBK likes to stay out of the spotlight.

Often referred to by the media as “China’s Warren Buffett,” Duan is even more mysterious than the electronics empire he has built.

Duan came from humble beginnings. He was born to a farming family in the 1960s in the Jiangxi province in southeast China. In 1978, Duan enrolled in Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, where he majored in wireless electronics engineering. He was among the first group of students in the country to graduate from the university after the Cultural Revolution.

After receiving a master’s degree from Renmin University of China in Beijing, Duan went to work for a company called Zhongshan Yihua as the manager of a loss-making factory. The firm was known for making a knockoff version of Family Computer or Famicom, Nintendo’s bestselling gaming console, in the ‘80s.

At a fourth of the original’s price, Yihua’s product was a runaway success, but Duan knew that it wasn’t enough to get the company very far. So he rebranded it as an educational device that allows children and students to learn English. It also had a new name: Subor or Xiao Bawang, which translates to “little tyrant” in English.

The change worked. Duan made Subor appealing to both kids and parents, and it’s still an iconic brand for Chinese born in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

By 1995, the product’s sales hit 1 billion yuan (US$141 million) in a year. Before Duan joined Yihua, the factory was losing 2 million yuan per year. A key reason for his success was the emphasis on marketing. In the ‘90s, he gained a reputation for winning bids to air commercials on state-owned television channel CCTV during primetime, the most valuable and coveted ad slots at the time.

Building a smartphone empire

Top brands in China

Duan’s influence