Ma Huateng

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The company created by Ma Huateng, Tencent Holdings, created the wildly popular WeChat application.

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Ma Huatengis a Chinese business executive who cofounded the Internet company Tencent Holdings in 1998 and is Tencent’s CEO. Tencent, which is based in Shenzhen, China, created the hugely successful WeChat application, which had more than 1 billion users as of December 2023.

Ma earned a B.S. in computer science at Shenzhen University in 1993. He then worked in research and development for China Motion Telecom Development Ltd. before founding Tencent in 1998 with several friends. A year later the company launched the Internet-based QQ service (then called OICQ), which soon became one of China’s most popular instant-messaging platforms. Tencent subsequently gained the backing of two overseas venture-capital firms and raised nearly $200 million when it went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange in June 2004.

Under Ma’s leadership, Tencent greatly expanded its offerings to provide users with a range of what the company described as “online lifestyle services.” In addition to instant messaging, such services included e-commerce sites, online media outlets, gaming, social networking sites, online advertising, and online payment processing. The company’s influence on the Chinese market was immense.

By late 2015 QQ had approximately 850 million monthly active users, and WeChat—a mobile instant-messaging app that was first introduced in 2011—had some 650 million users. Tencent also operated the social networking site Qzone, which boasted more than 670 million monthly active users in 2015, making it the world’s third largest social network, behind only Facebook and YouTube. Tencent’s immense success made Ma, who was widely referred to as “Pony” Ma (the nickname was a play on his surname, which means “horse” in Chinese), one of the wealthiest individuals in China.