By March 2014 Cheetah Mobile's apps had been installed on 502.1 million mobile devices. Its hit was Clean Master, a free Android app that cleared junk files and promised a faster phone. The Beijing company was a spinoff of the Chinese software maker Kingsoft, which kept control after the IPO. Xiaomi and Baidu bought shares alongside the offering. Smartphones were spreading fast across the developing world, and Cheetah wanted to be on all of them.

Security Software Goes Mobile

Cheetah Mobile was formed in 2010 by combining Kingsoft's antivirus business with Conew, a startup run by Fu Sheng. As chief executive, Fu saw that cheap Android phones were filling up and slowing down around the world. The bet was to give away tools that fixed that, win hundreds of millions of users, and earn money by showing them ads. In March 2014 its apps had 362 million monthly users, 222.5 million of them on mobile.

From Utilities to Robots

Cheetah Mobile priced its ADSs at $14 in May 2014 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as CMCM. The shares ended their first day just above that price. Its ad business later ran into trouble. In 2020 Google removed dozens of its apps from the Play Store over its ad practices. Cheetah turned to AI and service robots, and it remains listed on the NYSE.

Cover: A Tyger (A Recumbent Leopard by a Tree), George Stubbs. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a big cat at rest (the cheetah).