Kate Wang grew up in the city of Xi’an, in central China, where famous terracotta statues rest.

Wang describes the years spent in his hometown as peaceful. In 2005, she graduated in finance from Xi’an Jiaotong University. His career began as a management trainee at the giant Procter & Gamble in Guangzhou. She spent three years there as a project manager in beauty industry before moving to Hong Kong, where she co-founded a small investment company. The entrepreneur quickly wanted elsewhere and moved to New York to pursue an MBA at Columbia Business School. She then discovers a totally different universe, filled with new opportunities that change her state of mind.

Wang returned to China and spent a year at the consultancy firm Bain & Co. in Beijing.

She then continued for four years at Uber China and the Chinese carpooling service Didi Chuxing, which merged with Uber’s Chinese activities in 2016. The challenge was huge : few people knew the service and the drivers were not interested in becoming partners. Wang develops his entrepreneurial spirit there and demonstrates his leadership. 2017 marks a turning point for the businesswoman. The electronic cigarette is then well developed in the United States but very little in China: less than 0.5% of the 300M smokers in the country use vapers. Her mother, a smoker, then struggles to quit smoking. Worse yet, his father smokes two packs a day and puts his health at risk.

Wang does not take long to see an opportunity.

Rather than urging smokers to quit, she is considering the development of e-cigarettes that may appeal to both old and new generations. She left Didi and launched the RLX business in January 2018, teaming up with five of her former colleagues. It first uses crowdfunding via the JD.com platform then raises $6M via the company IDG Capital and Source Code Capital. RLX then offers elegant and easy to use vapes with a wide range of flavors, including original tastes designed to evoke the nostalgia to older users. The company hires young graduates and markets itself as a tech start-up, sourcing from partners such as Smoore, the world’s largest manufacturer of vaping devices. At the time, the market in China was almost entirely unregulated, unlike cigarettes, and RLX was growing exponentially. In three years of existence, the company has gained 60% of the Chinese market. In April 2019, RLX raised $75M in a round table between Sequoia China and billionaire investor Yuri Milner. In September, same year, the company opened a sprawling 4,000-worker factory in Shenzhen City. The company has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since January 2021.

And yet it was not all easy. In 2019, the Chinese regulator is looking into e-cigarettes and banning online sales to prevent underage vaping.

Wang then changed strategy and opened a department store in Shanghai which completed its network of more than 5,000 points of sale in 250 cities in China. The company is also installing facial recognition technology to prevent minors from making purchases at its outlets. Having overcome this challenge, Wang must now convince investors that the Chinese government will not take control of the e-cigarette industry for itself. The 39-year-old billionaire looks confident in taking her young business to new heights. Wang in particular anticipated by creating a research laboratory on the effects of vaping and the development of new technologies. The 308M Chinese smokers market has a bright future ahead of it and could be the next big market for electronic cigarettes. Wang lives in Beijing and owns 20% of RLX technology. The entrepreneur is an avid reader and is particularly fond of the book The Art of Loving, by philosopher Eric Fromm.