Cheetah Mobile Inc. named Charles Fan as its new Chief Technology Officer. Charles will lead the global R&D activities for the company. Based out of Silicon Valley, Charles will also lead the creation of a major presence of Cheetah Mobile in the U.S. Cheetah Mobile has a goal of growing the Silicon Valley office into its second worldwide headquarters alongside Beijing.
Charles joins Cheetah Mobile from VMware, a leading cloud computing company, where he served as Senior Vice President leading its storage and big data businesses. Charles was also the founder of VMware and EMC’s China R&D Centers and grew them from 0 to over 1,000 engineers within three years. Charles started his career as an entrepreneur, co-founding file virtualization startup Rainfinity, which was acquired by EMC in 2005. Charles is an expert in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and big data, holding a Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Cooper Union.
A successful big data strategy is key to Cheetah Mobile’s next stage of growth. Cheetah Mobile will establish a major R&D Center in Silicon Valley, to work alongside engineers at other R&D Centers to execute the big data strategy. This will allow Cheetah Mobile to better attract worldwide talent and serve its more than 567 million mobile monthly active users, 74% of which are outside of China. Cheetah Mobile currently employs more than 1,400 R&D personnel around the globe.
“I’m thrilled to join one of the fastest-growing mobile companies in the world,” said Cheetah Mobile CTO Charles Fan. “Cheetah Mobile has succeeded at achieving a truly global footprint, and I’m excited to lead its technology team as it continues its mission of making the mobile experience speedier, simpler, and safer.”
Cheetah Mobile President and former CTO Ming Xu is handing over the CTO role to Charles in order to focus more on overall management of the company.
“We’re delighted to welcome Charles to the Cheetah Mobile family,” said Ming Xu, President of Cheetah Mobile. “I know our big data and R&D are in very capable hands. I’m looking forward to going deeper with Cheetah Mobile’s management and product operations.”
“Combining proven leadership and a deep insight into technology, Charles is the perfect person to lead our technology team, and to take our U.S. presence to the next level,” said Sheng Fu, CEO of Cheetah Mobile. “China and the U.S. are the two centers of the mobile Internet industry today. As one of the most successful companies to develop business abroad in China’s mobile internet industry, Cheetah Mobile will ramp up our investments in both centers, especially the U.S. market, to connect the global markets, as well as to deliver innovations to our users around the world.”
Cheetah Mobile first established its U.S. operations in early 2014. At present, the company has roughly 50 employees based in the US, across three offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and New York. The company expects to significantly expand its U.S. operations and hiring over the next two years.
Source: Cheetah Mobile
