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

Sep 24 , 2019

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.

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

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.

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.