Knowing his customers put Ma on top

In China's Internet industry, few firms have the courage or the ability to compete with almost all of the country's top Internet companies at the same time.

But Pony Ma and his company Tencent seem to be the only exception.

Backed by its dominating position in China's instant messaging market, Tencent spent two years to make QQ.com China's most visited portal website, easily surpassing market leader Sina and Sohu, both of whom had spent nearly 10 years gaining similar success.

Tencent also beat China's largest online casual game provider Ourgame within one year, threatening the position of the country's massive online game providers such as Shanda, NetEase and The9.

Even before Alibaba established its popular Taobao.com website in 2003, Ma had the idea of entering the C2C (customer to customer) market, which later lead to the launch of Tencent's C2C platform Paipai.com in 2005.

In 2006, Ma even tried to take over Google's China business to enter the search engine market, which later failed but triggered Tencent to release its own search engine Sousou.

These moves not only made Tencent China's largest and most profitable Internet conglomerates, but also gained Ma the name of "public enemy" in China's Internet industry.

Critics said Ma's success simply derives from the luck of being in a dominating position in China's instant messaging market, where users have the highest loyalty to a single software as long as most of their friends are using the same product.

Conversely supporters have praised Ma for his "unique understanding and sensitivity" to users needs.

Culture success

Unlike other industries such as manufacturing and textiles, the Internet is a business about people. Whether it is news portal, instant messaging, e-commerce or social networking, user experiences play a key role in the success of these products.

That requires Internet service providers not only to fulfill their users' basic needs for information and communication but also understand their emotions and behaviors - in other words, Internet company founders have to become a "big brother" who can speak the same language and share the same interests as users.

This "culture barrier" is one of the major reasons behind why foreign Internet giants such as AOL (American Online), eBay, Yahoo! and Google hasn't done well in China.

Compared with other success entrepreneurs, Ma seems to have a better intuition regarding his users' needs. After graduating from Shenzhen University majoring computer science, Ma was one of China's earlier netizens.

In his earlier days working at Runxun Communications, Ma spent most of his spare time working voluntarily as the Webmaster of CFIDO (one of the earliest Chinese sites) in Shenzhen.

These early online experiences not only gave him an unique understanding of the Internet, but also helped him win friends, business partners, and even his wife (Ma met his wife through QQ).

That could explains how Ma thought of the idea of selling virtual images and items to his QQ users, which later became a major revenue generator for his online empire.

This business model works so well that critics even fretted that the QQ coin, Tencent's virtual currency used for payment of virtual items and services, could challenge the yuan's status as the only legitimate currency in China.

Even now, Ma still regards himself as a product manager rather than the chief executive of one of China's largest Internet companies. He, like 10 years ago, seldom loses his temper, is quiet but always energetic about new products.

And he says that what he is most proud of is the fact that three of his four co-founders are still with him.

(China Daily 01/12/2009 page12)