Ma Huateng is a Chinese billionaire entrepreneur who is the founder and chairman of the board of directors of the telecommunications company Tencent. At the time of the book’s release, it ranks 20th in the ranking of the world’s billionaires according to Forbes magazine. Tencent’s QQ instant messaging program has spawned a new youth Internet culture and has been used as a powerful commercial and marketing tool, allowing Ma Huaten’s company to become a leader in other segments: online games, social media, and electronic payment systems.
The success of Ma Huateng’s business in innovative copying for the giant Chinese market of Western counterparts, and a feature of his business strategy – is much more active than competitors’ investments in foreign assets.
Famous Chinese billionaire Ma Huateng founded in China a version of the well-known ICQ – the country’s hugest virtual instant messaging program – QQ, as one of the founders of Tencent Telecommunications Corporation. Ma was interested in telecommunications much more than capital accumulation, but it did not prevent him from increasing his fortune 9 times from $ 5 billion in 2011 to 45.3 billion in 2018.
In the early years
Ma Huateng is a native of the coastal Chinese province of Guangdong. He was born on October 29, 1971, in the city of Chaoyang. The early years of the young entrepreneur were remembered for his constant moving until his father received the position of manager in the port of Shenzhen.
As a child, the future billionaire dreamed of becoming an astronomer. But everything changed when, in his youth, he became the owner of a personal computer – a miracle of thought straight from the capitalist world. His passion for them determined his entire future life – Ma Huateng decided that he would devote his life to the study of computer science.
After completing his secondary education, he became a student at the prestigious Shenzhen University with a degree in Computer Engineering. In 1993, Huateng completed it with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
Tencent
Ma Huateng’s friend and former classmate Zhang Zhidong and three other friends created Tencent in 1998 to provide communication services to local operators and registered it in the Cayman Islands. In Chinese, the company is called Tengxun, and Tencent is for foreigners. A year later, his dream came true in the form of QQ – the first Chinese online messenger. By the way, QQ means “cute” or “cute” in Chinese.
The entrepreneur adopted the experience of the leading players in the IT market of the time, Google and Yahoo!, and filled the empty niche. QQ has become a reliable and highly recommended medium of communication for the youth of his country. In no time, the Chinese audience won.
At the beginning of the company’s existence, it was not always possible to attract a sufficient amount of investment. Huateng, on the one hand, tried his best to keep the company afloat, and on the other, to make a living. He did not run a startup, but he also managed to be a janitor and a designer.
Huateng developed and adhered to a particular strategy in his work – the products he created had to complement each other, leaving no room for competitors. A person who turns to the Tencent service must get all the functions he needs so that there is no need to look for an alternative. Over time, the ecosystem of the company covered almost every area of the Internet: email and commerce, Internet paging, payment systems, and mobile games.
In February 1999, Tencent launched OICQ (Open ICQ), an instant messaging service.
By the way, Ma himself claims that the QQ messenger helped him meet his future wife.
And by 2004, after a successful IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange, the company had attracted about $ 200 million. And not only the Chinese but also the American press began to write about Ma Huateng.
The most famous development of Tencent is WeChat. Huateng was aware of the potential of smartphones. The advancement of a new product was started in 2008 by Huateng. And two groups of developers commenced creating an innovative product. Thus, in 2011, a “small letter” from Tensyun appeared – the Weixin messenger – an original good, the Chinese analog of WhatsApp.
In September 2016, Tencent was ranked as the most expensive in China. And Tencent QQ has evolved into a large instant communications service structure. She has created a huge number of Internet services, and in the field of mobile and computer games, she even reached world leadership and created the revolutionary WeChat messenger.
No one is hindered by the fact that many of the new products of the Tengxun company are spied on by Western companies. But even in its current state, Tencent is one of the largest in the world, practically not inferior to the US giants like Google or Microsoft.
