The road to becoming a billionaire of NetEase boss: Being the richest man in China at the age of 32 thanks to video games

William Lei Ding (also known as Ding Lei) is a Chinese businessman and billionaire. He is the founder and CEO of NetEase, one of the world’s largest online gaming companies.

About the biography, Lei Ding was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang province. He graduated from Chengdu Radio Engineering Institute (now China University of Electronic Science and Technology). Before becoming rich through video games, Ding worked in a government agency as an engineer.

He then moved to Guangzhou in Guangdong province and worked at the US-based software analytics company Sybase.

Having worked at Sybase for a while and experienced in technology, Ding ventured to start NetEase in June 1997, when Ding was only 26 years old. In the beginning, the company only had 3 employees and did not operate in the video game field.

At first, when researching and researching about the market’s needs, Lei Ding realized that the Chinese market did not have many software for converting languages ​​to Chinese. So he and his team developed a software system in Chinese that allows easier and more convenient language switching, especially during email usage.

The app then quickly became popular all over China. Besides, NetEase was also famous as a hosting company that offered 163 popular email domains at the time. It didn’t take long for Ding’s company to take the leap when it went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange between 1999 and 2020.

However, despite raising $70 million in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq, a year later NetEase faced a financial scandal that caused the company’s shares to be suspended for four months.

While the company was struggling, Ding found a new opportunity in the game market, the company immediately invested heavily in the development of online video games. The explosion of the Internet at that time helped Ding’s company grow even more.

Just two years later, in 2003, the video game business made Ding China’s richest man with a fortune of $2.95 billion.

One of NetEase’s popular games is the Fantasy Westward Journey Series, a game inspired by the 16th century novel Journey to the West. As of 2015, this game has about 310 million subscribers. Not only stopping there, Ding also seeks to develop video games on mobile platforms.

Currently, the NetEase company is famous for its online games, email service, news service and Kaola e-commerce platform.

According to the list of the richest technology billionaires in 2022 published by Forbes earlier this year, William Ding Lei ranked 11th with a fortune of $ 25.2 billion. Mr. Ding is behind Tencent’s boss – Ma Huateng and above famous billionaire Jack Ma

References: South China Morning Post, Forbes, Bloomberg…