PRD VIP is a monthly snippet where we introduce a person of Guangdong heritage who has made an impact on the world stage.
As the world’s third largest Internet company, Tencent’s sphere of business covers messaging, online games, dot-com, e-commerce, search engines and more. It’s always playing the field and waiting for the right moment to take its share of the pie, but in most cases, be it QQ or WeChat, it’s the terminator that dominates the whole market.
Ma Huateng is the man at the helm of Tencent’s operations. Born in Shantou, Ma moved to Shenzhen at the age of 10, where he studied computer science and applications at Shenzhen University. Five years after graduation, Ma founded Tencent in 1998. Amidst trials and errors, as well as an Internet bubble in the year 2000, QICQ – Tencent’s copy of the then-popular instant messaging app ICQ – was born, and later became QQ.
By 2001, literally every Chinese student had a QQ account. It became a phenomenon, an addiction – the thing no one could live without. Ma himself met his wife through it. When Tencent went public in 2004, Ma was worth 1.7 billion Hong Kong dollars.
With QQ’s success, Ma Huateng and his team embarked on various other projects. But as each new Tencent product was introduced, Ma was hammered for being a copycat. Jack Ma said he wasn’t innovative and reprehended him for knocking off Taobao.com with Paipai.com, while Sina’s CEO called him the ‘king of plagiarism.’ Ma Huateng, however, begged to differ: “Copying can be seen as a way to study, absorb and making the best of both worlds,” he claimed.
Where he relied on influence for inspiration, Ma built upon existing ideas to create something markedly different. Today, WeChat has surpassed QQ as China’s largest messaging platform. We don’t have to tell you how big it is – you probably have the application open right now.
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