10 things you didn't know about Tencent CEO Pony Ma
Ma Huateng, China’s richest man according to ‘Forbes’, met his wife through QQ and drives a Volvo S80L which was manufactured in China
Forbes has named a Chinese entrepreneur on its new World’s Billionaires list. Ma Huateng, also known as Pony Ma, is the country’s richest man and is worth about US$45.3 billion.
Here are 10 lesser-known things about this self-made billionaire.
1. “Brother Pony” is Ma’s – whose last name literally means “pony” or “horse” in Chinese – genial moniker in China. He is a first-generation Shenzhen migrant who earned his Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Shenzhen University. He is also a National People’s Congress (NPC) delegate.
2. Ma started his career at as a programmer with CMMobile, a telephone pager service company before founding Tencent. This experience was the cornerstone for his communication apps QQ and WeChat. The latter is now China’s most popular messaging app which has more than 1 billion users with profits of 23.29 billion yuan (US$3.7 billion).
3. In 1998, Ma and his friends, including Zhang Zhidong, founded Tencent. Ten years later, Tencent is listed by Forbes as the World's Most Admired Companies. Ma says, the most crucial factor in starting his business is trust.
4. When Ma co-founded Tencent, his entrepreneurship was not based on innovative ideas. He was pragmatic and used his knowledge and experience to set up instant messaging software OICQ, later known as QQ. It was actually another iteration of ICQ, developed by Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996. QQ was China's go-to chatting app before WeChat was introduced in 2011.
5. Ma, with a 9.7 per cent ownership of Tencent, is not the largest shareholder. MIH Holdings, an offshore subsidiary of South African multimedia conglomerate Naspers, owns 34 per cent of Tencent.
