Ma Huateng, founder of Tencent Holdings—the Chinese internet and gaming giant—has unseated Alibaba's Jack Ma as the richest person in the country. Wealth of Ma Huateng, popularly known as Pony Ma, surged after Tencent Holding, China's largest game developer, recently surpassed Alibaba as Asia's most-valuable company.
The company's shares rose 4.9 per cent to record highs on Hong Kong's exchange on Tuesday, leapfrogging Alibaba. The Shenzhen-based firm is currently worth $613 billion, the seventh most globally.
As a result, Tencent's Pony Ma's worth is now $50 billion, surpassing Jack Ma's $48 billion, propelling him to become China's richest person. Pony Ma owns a 7 per cent stake in the company and pocketed about $757 million from selling some 14.6 million of his Tencent shares this year, data complied by Bloomberg show.
Born in China's Guangdong province, Pony Ma co-founded Tencent in late 1990s, just five years after graduating with a bachelor's in computer science from Shenzhen University. He's known as 'Pony Ma' because his surname Huateng translates to "horse" in English.
Tencent has come a long way since hitting a low in 2018, when China froze the approval process for new games. Since then, the stock has almost doubled, and last month the tech giant reported a 26 per cent jump in first-quarter revenue.
With more people turning to the online world, especially in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, internet companies in China have grown multifold. Similar to Tencent's growth story, there is Pinduoduo, a Groupon-like shopping app also known as PDD, whose value has also more than doubled this year.
The rally has propelled Colin Huang of PDD, whose net worth stands at $43 billion, also among the top three wealthiest in China. PDD popularised what is known as the social media shopping. When a user selects an item on Pinduoduo, they can choose to participate in group buying. The more people that join in, the lower the price of the item goes.