On October 29, 1971, Ma Huateng was born in Chaoyang, China. Ma Chenshu, the young Ma, joined his father, Ma Chenshu, when he accepted a job as a port manager in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Having studied at Shenzhen University in 1989 and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in computer science in 1993.
Ma and four pals co-founded Tencent, Inc. in 1998. The money they used to launch the firm came primarily from stock market profits. As is typical of most companies, Ma and his colleagues encountered difficulties in the first few years of operation. To keep the firm viable, he took on several tasks ranging from janitor to website designer. Tencent first provided e-mail and internet paging services.
Tencent founded QQ, an online messaging service, in 1999. Tencent began to provide the service as a free download in order to get a larger market share. As a consequence, nearly 5 million people joined the service in a year.
Ma may now provide additional perks to QQ users, such as ring tones and subscriptions. He expanded his cellular phone services and personalised various goods. Tencent became China's leading instant messaging service in 2004. It was dubbed "China's response to AOL." Tencent had its first public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June 2004. Stock prices increased by over 60% in a short period of time. Ma was not certain that Tencent will continue to be successful. He kept expanding while keeping the core instant messaging business.
As a result, Tencent stated in 2004 that it would be introducing games to its services. This news attracted over 1 million internet gamers in China. He considered e-commerce and how it could be integrated into Tencent's services. He struck a collaboration agreement with Google but did not sell his company. WeChat, Tencent's mobile messaging service, has more than 200 million active users in 2012. Tencent was included in the Forbes Asia Fab 50 list of the region's greatest major firms in 2013.
Wealth won't give you satisfaction; creating a good product that's well received by users is what matters most.
There should be order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.
Look at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. They have all entered many sectors, and actually, in many of those sectors, they weren't as early as Tencent.
I think Steve Jobs is my idol.
You need to have extraordinary wisdom to be the forerunner.
I've always been kind of an escape artist. I think that I thought the day-to-day reality of things was unbearably flat.
The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.
My biggest crisis is that I don't understand what young people like.
A Central Bank official said that Q-coin did not affect the renminbi; it adds vibrancy to the economy.
Users are innocent for they can not really make sure if their information is safe or not.
When I was little, I wanted to be an astronomer, but that didn't happen.
If you ask me what I worry about every morning when I wake up, it's that I don't understand future mainstream Internet users' habits.
It's difficult for any single company to develop all the applications and services.
Think of yourself as an insensitive, nitpicking, irritable fool to use the product.
In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live.
I think every Internet user likes personalization.
Looking back at the development of Tencent’s 10 years of business, it is actually trying slowly. With confidence, the pace will gradually become bigger.
Ideas are not important in China, execution is.
There should be an order if the development of the cyber world is to be sustainable.
Actually, I am very fancy to pay.
The media is better at talking like this. I am not very comfortable with the lens. Social communication is not like this, and I don’t like socializing.