William Ding

Founder of NetEase

• Born: October 1, 1971
• Place of Birth: Fenghua, Ningbo Prefecture, Zhejiang Province, People's Republic of China

Primary Company/Organization: NetEase

Introduction

William Ding changed the state of the Chinese Internet industry with the founding and evolution of NetEase.When he launched the company in 1997, most of China's immense population did not have easy or affordable access to the Internet. Ding revolutionized the market by creating an online portal that gave anyone in China free access to e-mail and the Internet. Building on the success of the portal NetEase.com, Ding expanded the business into new segements with innovative technologies. In the process, he created many “firsts” within China's Internet industry, including the country's first online auction (which paved the way for e-commerce applications) and the first Chinese-language search engine and online community. NetEase became China's leading Internet portal and community and made Ding one of the world's wealthiest entrepreneurs. With the inclusion in its portfolio of online multiuser computer games, NetEase and Ding continued to blaze trails in China's Internet frontier.

Early Life

William Ding was born as Ding Lei in the small and ancient city of Fenghua in Zhejiang Province on China's southeast coast. The city is best known as the hometown of political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek. Despite growing up in the region, Ding was more impressed by revolutionary science and technology than military might. As a child, Ding counted among his heroes Albert Einstein and Thomas Alva Edison. By his early teens, Ding had become fascinated with electronics and was able to assemble his own transistor radios. He envisioned himself one day being an exceptional mechanical engineer.

Ding attended Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering, China's first institution of higher education dedicated to electronic and information science and technology. During his four years at the school (now known as the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China) Ding was an eager and inquisitive student, but he was also fiercely independent. He approached things his own way, whether it was the question he posed or the methods he used to study. He earned high grades and spent his free time perusing the school library's enormous collection of books on information technology and electronics. He has reflected on his days at the school—and the time spent in its grand library—as among his most cherished. Ding did not spend all his time with books, however. He was creating and developing his own software by the time he graduated with a bachelor's degree in communication technology in 1993.

Life's Work

Ding began his professional career as a technical engineer working for China Telecom's branch in Ningbo Prefecture. He left that position in 1995, after two years, relocating to the country's third-largest city, Guangzhou, in southern China. There he accepted a high-paying position as a project manager and technical support engineer at the China offices of U.S.-based software company Sybase. He stayed with Sybase for only one year before departing in 1996 to join Guangzhou Feijie Company as a systems analyst. Ding again left after a year. This time, however, he did not put down roots with another existing enterprise. Instead, he created his own.

Ding founded NetEase in May 1997 in Beijing as an Internet portal specifically designed for users in mainland China. By then, he had realized two things: first, that the Internet represented the future of information technology, and second, that the majority of the mainland Chinese population either did not have or were unlikely to use their disposable income to pay for Internet service. Ding, a lifelong believer in the importance of setting goals and seizing opportunities, decided to take a calculated risk. He launched Netease.com to provide every user with free e-mail and a personal website. His peers called him crazy, saying he would never be able to make money with his model of free access. In fact, his own brother declined to join the fledgling firm for fear of imminent disaster. Ding held fast to his belief that the volume of traffic generated by the site would attract paying advertisers.

Ding's gamble paid off. After only three years of operation, NetEase.com was experiencing some 6 million page views daily. The substantial success of Ding's unorthodox endeavor started attracting investors, and it was not long before the company had financial backing from several of the leading financial giants of the time, including the bank ING and Goldman Sachs. Spurred by his company's early wins and newly acquired fiscal support, Ding, as chief executive officer (CEO), began expanding the business. He added China's first personalized information service, the first Chinese-language search engine, and his country's first online auction site. The latter required some ingenuity once it became evident that most of China's population did not have credit cards to pay for items online. Ding solved the problem with the inclusion of a cash-on-delivery option for online purchasers. That move opened the door for e-commerce in China, not only demonstrating the colossal demand among the Chinese population for diverse merchandise and value (not available via the country's brick-and-mortar retail stores) but also providing a model and means to help businesses tap a massive and widely scattered national market.

In April 2000, Ding stepped down as NetEase's CEO, becoming the company's chief technology officer. The move was designed to enable him to focus on technology and product innovation rather than on the daily operations of managing the business. In both capacities, he faced strict challenges in the form of Chinese government regulations restricting and censoring content, defining user privacy policies, and regulating public offerings by corporations. NetEase became a public company.

In 2001, NetEase faced a crisis amid rumors that it had misreported its finances. Its stock price plunged on threats of delisting, but NetEase pulled through, and by the next year its stock was soaring. In March, Ding became chief architect of NetEase.com, which was ranked among the most-visited Internet sites in the world. Ding held the chief architect position until November 2005, when he returned to the top spot as the company's CEO.

Since returning to the helm, Ding has developed NetEase into one of China's largest and most successful companies for massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In 2009, NetEase entered into a lucrative licensing agreement with Irvine, California–based Blizzard Entertainment to bring the U.S. gaming company's hugely successful World of Warcraft to audiences in mainland China. Under the agreement, the two companies also launched several other games, which were well received. In March 2012, NetEase and Blizzard extended the agreement to continue their partnership for an additional three years. That was good news for NetEase. The company's online game operations accounted for the biggest share of the company's millions of dollars in revenue. It was also good news for Ding, who held 45 percent of NetEase's stock. Ding stepped down from leading the company in 2022 while many tech leaders were also doing the same after changes in Beijing have hampered sales.

By 2003, Ding had been recognized as being China's wealthiest individual. Since then, he has consistently appeared on the Forbes lists of the world's richest billionaires. According to Forbes, he had a net worth of $32 billion as of 2023. He was the forty-eighth richest person in the world.

Personal Life

In addition to leading NetEase, Ding has become involved with two decidedly low-tech ventures: a pig farm and a winery. Both enterprises resulted from Ding's negative personal experiences: one at a Chinese fondue restaurant and the other while purchasing a bottle of wine that proved to have expired. The first incident prompted Ding to invest in an 800-square-kilometer pig farm in China's rural countryside and launch an agriculture division of NetEase. As a result of the second incident, Ding used his own money to partner with some friends in the purchase of a château in Zhejiang Province near his hometown in Ningbo Prefecture. The purpose of the château was to serve as the base for the operation of a wine importation business.

While those ventures garnered Ding some unusual attention, he has also earned public kudos for his work with NetEase. In 2004, he was honored with the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for his innovative utilization of information technology, and in 2000 he was nominated for the prestigious Internet World Asia Industry Award in the category Internet Visionary of the Year.

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