TENCENT co-founder Pony Ma Huateng returned to the top of the wealth rankings in China, making him the latest tech billionaire to achieve the status.
Weak economic data from the world’s second-biggest economy sent some Hong Kong-listed shares lower on Monday (Sep 16), allowing Ma to surpass bottled water tycoon Zhong Shanshan with a fortune of US$43.9 billion, indicated the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Zhong drops to third place, and the founder of privately-held TikTok owner ByteDance Zhang Yiming is second.
Ma’s wealth swelled lately as Tencent gains surpassed the performance of any similar-sized rival, riding a resurgence of gaming in China, the world’s biggest mobile arena.
The success of blockbuster titles from its Dungeon & Fighter Mobile to Black Myth: Wukong – a cultural triumph that it backed – coupled with pledges of support from Beijing, helped propel Tencent to levels not seen since Covid-era internet peaks.
This comes after China spent the better part of two years reining in the country’s most powerful tech companies, such as Alibaba Group and Didi Global, along with their ultra-rich founders.
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That clampdown eroded investor and entrepreneurial confidence, and chilled a private sphere that was crucial in propelling the Chinese economic miracle of past decades.
Ma, who once embodied China’s ruling class of exorbitantly wealthy tech moguls, was also caught up in the purge.
But unlike his more outspoken colleagues, Tencent’s founder has always been something of a recluse, shunning the spotlight and preferring to orchestrate activity from behind the scenes.
His wealth is still down about 40 per cent from its peak in January 2021, showed Bloomberg’s wealth index.
He is the third person to hold the title of China’s richest since July, after record-breaking sell-offs erased billions from the fortunes of the nation’s richest and revealed deepening investor concern over the health of Asia’s biggest economy.
Colin Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings, held the crown for just 18 days last month before surprising his own investors with a gloomy outlook for his e-commerce company.
Ma established Tencent in 1998 with money he made from an earlier venture at a cost of 500,000 yuan (S$91,266), the equivalent of 62 years of the average Chinese wage at the time.
The native of China’s southern Guangdong province studied computer science at Shenzhen University and was a software developer before co-founding Tencent with four others.
Tencent, the world’s biggest games publisher, rocketed in the years before China’s crackdowns began, at its peak standing as the world’s fifth-most valuable company. Tencent also amassed stakes in Tesla, Reddit, Snap, Spotify Technology, and an array of global entertainment brands.
At that time, Ma was among the Chinese tycoons who accumulated vast fortunes on the back of surging economic growth, becoming the nation’s richest person in June 2020.
The bulk of Ma’s wealth is derived from his stake in Shenzhen-based Tencent, showed the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In the aftermath of China’s moves to curb the influence of tech companies and root out corruption tied to the “disorderly” expansion of capital, Tencent downsized by divesting or selling stakes in e-commerce and gaming assets, and the government ordered the company to overhaul its financial business.
Since late 2022, Beijing has sent clear signals that it is relenting, driven in part by the need to enlist private companies to revive the economy. Last year, it ended years of scrutiny into Ant Group and the fintech sector after imposing more than US$1 billion of fines. BLOOMBERG
