Who Owns WPS Office?

WPS began in 1988 at Kingsoft, a small software company in Zhuhai, China. Programmer Qiu Bojun wrote the original code largely alone, and WPS 1.0 shipped in 1989 for DOS-based PCs. It became the dominant Chinese-language word processor of the early PC era, at one point holding the overwhelming majority of word processing usage in China.

The arrival of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in the mid-1990s eroded that position. A 1996 agreement making WPS file formats interoperable with Word accelerated the shift, and Kingsoft's attempted response, the Pangu Office suite, failed against Office 95. Kingsoft nearly collapsed before rebuilding around games and other software.

WPS was re-architected in the 2000s. Kingsoft rewrote the suite to closely match Microsoft Office file compatibility and interface conventions, relaunching as WPS Office. Government and enterprise licensing inside China sustained the business while a consumer version spread through free distribution.

The office software business was reorganized as Beijing Kingsoft Office Software, Inc. in 2011, with Kingsoft Corporation retaining control. Mobile versions for Android and iOS pushed WPS Office onto hundreds of millions of devices, making it the default free office app for much of the Chinese smartphone market.

The company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market in November 2019 under ticker 688111, in one of the tech board's early high-profile IPOs.

Through the 2020s the suite added cloud collaboration through Kingsoft Docs and WPS 365 enterprise subscriptions, PDF editing, and the WPS AI family of assistants covering writing, reading, data, and design. Revenue reached RMB 5.93 billion in fiscal 2025, up 15.78 percent, and the first nine months of 2026 produced RMB 5.08 billion, up 21.57 percent.