The Vice Chairman of the consumer-electronics company Xiaomi, Lin Bin, seeks to buy 1 percent of the holding company that owns the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, according to Sportico. The same company owns the Dolphins’ home field (Hard Rock Stadium), the Miami Grand Prix (Formula 1) and the Miami Open (ATP Masters 1000, WTA 1000).
The purchase price is undisclosed, but the company’s agreed valuation is $12.5 billion, 1 percent of which is $125 million. Until now the highest valuation for a minority acquisition in the NFL was about $10 billion – a record set last October, when the Koch family purchased 10 percent of the New York Giants. Note, however, that Lin’s 1 percent is of the holding company, not the team alone. (According to CNBC, which cites “two people who are close to the deal but not authorized to speak publicly,” the Giants valuation was $10.3 billion.)
The NFL’s finance committee has approved the deal, but the team owners have yet to vote on the matter. A vote should take place at the next annual meeting, late this month.
More than Vice Chairman, Lin Bin is the co-founder of Xiaomi – along with Lei Jun, who is the company’s Chairman and CEO and has served as a deputy to China’s National People’s Congress since 2013.
Xiaomi (Beijing) – listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2018, with a market cap of 873.78 billion Hong Kong dollars (€96.234bn) as of this writing – deals in smartphones, Internet of Things (connected devices and appliances), internet services (ads, gaming, fintech, payments) and, most recently, electric cars. Counterpoint Research ranks it third in market share (13%) among smartphone producers for FY 2025, behind Apple (20%) and Samsung (19%) and ahead of Vivo and Oppo (both 8%).
Investment-fund connection?
According to the company’s voluntary announcement of Dec. 28, 2025, Lin will as of December 2026 be disposing of up to 500 million US dollars in class B ordinary shares in Xiaomi in any 12-month period, the total disposal never to exceed $2 billion. The proceeds are to go “primarily” towards “the establishment of an investment fund company.”
What relation, if any, this has to the Dolphins deal is undisclosed, but a connection seems unlikely. For one thing, December 2026 is a long nine months off from the likely vote of the NFL owners – although the gap between deal closing and payment tends not to be public information.
More importantly, though, Lin (a citizen of the US) is acquiring his stake as an individual limited partner – the kind of investor the NFL has long welcomed. In other words, this deal probably lies outside the scope of the NFL owners’ Resolution JC-7, passed in August 2024 and enabling private equity to acquire passive, non-voting minority stakes in NFL teams. The NFL has so far limited the potential acquirers to Arctos Partners, Ares Management, Sixth Street and a consortium of Blackstone, Carlyle, CVC Capital Partners, Dynasty Equity and Ludis.
Dolphins equity
The majority stake in the Miami Dolphins has since 2009 lain in the hands of Stephen Ross, founder of the real-estate firm Related Companies, the value of whose portfolio exceeds $60 billion. In 2024 Ross sold stakes of 10 and 3 percent respectively – at a valuation of $8.1 billion – to Ares Management and to two individuals, Joe Tsai and Oliver Weisberg.
In other words, the team’s valuation has increased by 54.3 percent in 15 months or so. Sportico set the Dolphins’ value at $8.25 billion on its valuations table for 2025, ranking the team seventh of 32.
