Billionaire Ma Huateng : Net Worth, Career, and his Investments

Ma Huateng is a Chinese business mogul, investor, philanthropist, and politician. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of the Tencent conglomerate which is one of the biggest internet and technology companies in the world and the biggest provider of online gaming and entertainment in the world. He is an investor with an eye for key investments that would yield more profit. He has since been likened to one of the world’s most renown investors, Warren Buffet. He is ranks No. 21 on the Forbes 2020 World's Billionaires list.

Net worth

$47.2 billion as of May 27, 2020

Early Life and education

Ma Hauteng (also known as Poly Ma) was born on the 29^th of October, 1971 in Choayang, Shantou. He graduated from Shenzen University with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1989.

Career

After graduating from the University, Ma got his first job as a software developer for pagers with China Motion Telecom, a provider of telecommunications products and services where he earned $176 monthly. He later got a job with Shenzhen Runxun Communications Co. Ltd. where he worked at the research and development department for internet call services.

Working at those two firms gave Ma the experience he needed to launch out on his own, and by 1998, Ma co-founded Tencent with four of his classmates, Chen Yidan, Zhang Zhidong, Zeng Liqing, and Xu Chenye. Ma and his team developed the first Tencent product in 1999 after Ma had attended a presentation of the world’s first internet messenger, ICQ which was founded by an Israeli company in 1996. Ma and his team launched their internet messenger software similar to the ICQ with a Chinese interface, and a slightly different name, OCIQ (Open CIQ). By the end of 1999, the internet service had over 1 million registered users as its fame had widely spread all around China.  Ma gives credit to the ICQ presentation as an inspiration for the launching of OICQ, however, after a lawsuit threat from AOL, the owner of ICQ, Ma had to rename his product QQ. However, what seemed to be a downturn for the company only further developed it. With the rename of QQ, the company was able to launch its own portal ‘QQ.Com’ which served as Tencent gate pass into the online gaming market.

Tencent was incorporated in the Cayman Islands with its initial funding gotten from venture capitalists. Despite having a large user base, the company wasn’t still making its expected profits at least for the first three years. The company’s initial main source of income was gotten from advertising and premium users. In 2001, along came Naspers, a South African media company that purchased 46.5% of Tencent shares, thereby making the company a majority owner of Tencent. By 2005, the income sources of Tencent multiplied through licensing its penguin character on third-party merchandise, cellular value-added services, and the use of QQ mobile. Three years later, the company began seeing feasible profits on its products and services.

In 2004, Tencent ventured into developing online games. It then increased its offerings in 2007/08 by licensing games. The company’s inclusion of online games became its most profitable venture as there was a high demand for it in the market as of 2010. Tencent Games, a division of Tencent Interactive Entertainment became the world’s biggest gaming company as of 2018. With instant messengers being the next big thing since search engines, Ma dug further into exploring his internet messaging service option with the creation of Weixin, a social media application, now known as WeChat. It has since become one of the most used social media platforms globally with a user-base of 1 billion.

Tencent, under Ma’s leadership, extended its services to provide its users with a variety of “online lifestyle services”, which comprised of online gaming platforms, e-commerce sites, social networking sites, online payment processing, online media outlets, and online advertising. This was done in addition to the QQ instant messaging service. The aim of Ma, was to make available to his customer’s basic online services, and the years evolved and trends changed, so has Tencent in keeping up with customer demands.

Investments

Still, in 2011, Tencent acquired a 92.78% majority interest in Riot Games for $230 million. The company already had a 22.34% of the equity interest since 2008. And by 2015, the remaining equity of Riot Games was sold to Tencent.  In 2012, Tencent acquired a minority stake in Epic Games, and by 2013, the company increased its stake at Kingsoft Network Technology by 18% on its previous 15.68% through an investment worth $46.98 million.

In 2013, Tencent announced that it had invested $448 million in Sougou.com (a Chinese search engine), a subsidiary of Sohu, Inc as a minority shareholder. Tencent began extending its reach to e-commerce when it announced that it will invest HKD 1.5 billion (approx. $193.45 million) in China South City Holding Ltd., a logistics and warehouse company that deals with e-commerce and logistics business. The company ventured further into e-commerce business by acquiring a 15% stake in JD.com Inc., a Chinese e-commerce website, this was done in 2014. By May 2014, JD.com was listed on NASDAQ which encouraged Tencent to increase its stake to 17.43%.

In 2015, Ma further took Tencent to the next business level by launching WeBank, an online bank for China, making it the first of its kind. Still, in 2015, the company announced the signing of its $700 million deal with the National Basketball Association to broadcast basketball games in China. Through multiple investments in multiple areas, Tencent has experienced countless business breakthroughs and expansions.

Honors

●     Ma has been featured on Time’s list of most influential people in the world. He has been featured for at least three times—2007, 2014, and 2018, respectively.

●     Forbes featured Ma on their list of most powerful people in the world by ranking him 27^th in 2018

●     In 2017, Fortune listed Ma on their ‘top businessmen of the world list’.

●     In 2018, Ma was featured in the CEOWORLD Magazine as one of the ‘Most Powerful People in the World’.