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How internet billionaire Ding Lei brought Marvel Comics and World of Warcraft to China – and why he is now investing in pigs

Despite making his billions in video games and internet services, Ding Lei has made investments in agriculture as part of a bid to lift the fortunes of China’s rural communities.

Computer games, pig farming and online education may not immediately strike some as the most natural of bedfellows. But these are just some of the areas that Ding Lei – who is also known as William Ding – has dabbled in.

However, it was the video games that came first and still make up the bulk of the Ningbo, Zhejiang-born entrepreneur’s estimated US$16.8 billion net worth. Ding became China’s richest man and the country’s first internet and gaming billionaire back in 2003, when he had a “mere” US$2.95 billion fortune.

The founder and chief executive officer of NetEase, one of the world’s largest online and mobile games businesses, is placed at number 74 on Forbes’ “Real-Time Billionaires” list at time of writing.

But the 47-year-old, who is married but without children, had to slowly work his way up to the top by working hard and smart.

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NetEase CEO William Lei Ding can’t hide his good luck, during a press conference in Beijing in 2006. Photo: Bloomberg

After earning a degree in communication technology from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Ding started working in a local state department in Ningbo as an engineer.

After that, he moved to Guangzhou in the southern province of Guangdong, where he had a stint at US-based analytics software company, Sybase.

In June 1997, Ding founded NetEase in Guangzhou with just three employees. The software company made its mark by hosting the 163 email domain that is popular with Chinese netizens, and is named after the final numbers people needed to dial to connect their modem to the internet during the ISDN era in the 1990s.

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But that’s not all NetEase does. It grew rapidly thanks to investments in search engines and massive multiplayer online role-playing games.

However, it took a financial scandal before the software company truly found its footing.

Ding Lei was a star speaker at the 3rd World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, hosted in 2016. Photo: Simon Song

Rising to the top

The company listed and raised US$70 million on the Nasdaq exchange in 1999/2000. But controversy followed in 2001 when it was found NetEase had engaged in some creative accounting, which resulted in the stocks being suspended for four months. The company faced a difficult time convincing new investors to get on board after this.

It was during this period that Ding came up with the idea of going into games. Though he was faced with an unenthusiastic board, and only had the modest goal of breaking even, he was soon to strike a gold mine.

Just two years later, the gaming business had made Ding the richest man in China.

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NetEase’s popular Fantasy Westward Journey series – a game inspired by the 16th century novel, Journey to the West – had 310 million registered users as of 2015. That was also the year it launched a mobile version of the game.

“We need to spend more time thinking about how to make big revenues from mobile games,” Ding told Forbes in 2012. And he made quickly good on that.

NetEase’s popular Fantasy Westward Journey video game series was inspired by the 16th century Chinese novel, Journey to the West.

By 2016, the mobile app version of Fantasy Westward Journey had earned US$800 million in China alone. Not bad considering that was the year Pokémon Go fever took over the world.

NetEase has also partnered with America’s Blizzard Entertainment to bring popular titles like World of Warcraft and StarCraft to Chinese players.

Aware of its status in the gaming community, NetEase launched a spin-off comics business in 2015. As of last year, the platform publishes more than 2,000 comic book series. This includes those from 600 Chinese and overseas artists who have provided exclusive distribution rights for their content to the platform’s 40 million registered users.

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NetEase also signed a collaboration deal with Marvel Comics in 2017. NetEase now publishes various Marvel titles including Captain America and Iron Man in China. The partnership also led to the unveiling of the first Chinese superheroes in the Marvel universe, Swordmaster and Aero, via two sets of new comics published by NetEase Comics.

But NetEase has since stepped out from that market by selling the comics business to another Chinese company, the anime-streaming site Bilibili. However, it has retained the copyright for its Marvel series.

Giving back

In 2010, Ding used a fairly modest US$1.6 million budget to translate 8,000 hours of mostly American college classes into Chinese. He was inspired to do so after an employee asked him for funding to translate an educational video into Chinese.

He realised that US universities were posting their classes online for free and decided that this Open University-style series would be a great way to give back to Chinese internet users.

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“I'm very proud of this project. We don't get any revenue from advertising. But lots of Chinese people can watch different classes whenever they like,” he told Forbes in 2012.

In the same interview, Ding also spoke out about China's resistance to the company's open-course series and described its education system as “stodgy”.

Stodgy is something that Ding is not. The imaginative CEO set aside US$16 million for agricultural investments in 2012. One of the projects was an organic pig farm.

The farm project has since attracted about US$23 million from investors, including venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, US-based Meituan-Dianping and Alibaba competitor JD.

Ding sees this as a way to give back to China’s rural youth.

“They work very hard every day, over 10 hours, to make iPhones for the world. This is because they have no technology, no education and no money [coming] back to their land for high-quality organic agricultural projects,” says Ding, about the generational migration from the countryside to the city.

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The daring entrepreneur is definitely a go-getter.

“Smart guys seize opportunities and never let them slip between their fingers. And those who think themselves weak always wait for opportunities,” he says.

But it’s not about the dollar signs for him.

“Whether I'm going to be rich, like Jerry Yang, is not important to me,” he told the South China Morning Post in 1999. “What’s important to me is to lead the development of the Chinese internet industry, to be the mainstream player of the internet world in China.”

As Asia’s most-moneyed make their mark on the global stage, in this Crazy Rich Asians series, we chart the rise of the region’s richest families, most inventive entrepreneurs – and how they spend their epic wealth.

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Also known as William Ding, the NetEase founder got rich through video games including Fantasy Westward Journey, and brought US comic books including Iron Man and Captain America to China