Background
Ding Lei, also known as William Ding, was born on October 1, 1971 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province.
磊 丁
Ding Lei, also known as William Ding, was born on October 1, 1971 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province.
He graduated from the Chengdu College of Electronic Science and Technology (now the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China) with a bachelors degree in engineering.
After graduation, he worked in a local government department in Ningbo as an engineer and then went to Guangzhou to work for Sybase. In 1997, he left Sybase to found NetEase as an internet portal, which he took public on the NASDAQ in 2000. He became the richest man on mainland China in 2003 and according to Forbes, his net worth as of 2007 was estimated to be US$1.1 billion.
NetEase was started as a private enterprise with only a dozen staff members but is now a well-known web-based company that employs 300 people. During the first two years of its inception, Ding Lei paid great attention to R&D and injected capital into the development of internet application software, including a bilingual email system that was the first of its kind in China. The system, launched in November 1997, spurred the popularization and development of the internet in China. Since then, NetEase has developed a number of popular web-based products, including China’s first free email service, the first online community and the first personalized information service.
The company was originally set up to develop software products to facilitate internet use, however, Ding soon realized the great potential of the internet sector. In mid-1998, he switched the focus of NetEase from developing software to providing internet services. Thus, in addition to offering free email, the site developed and offered personalized homepages, virtual communities, chat rooms, games, and entertainment channels. In July 1999, NetEase conducted the first online auction in China and in November 1999, it launched both business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer business platforms. Ding’s site soon became a leading online service provider in China along with another well-known site, sohu.com, thus originating the popular saying, ‘The North has Sohu and the South has NetEase.’
In July 1999, Ding Lei brought NetEase wider geographical and consumer markets by forming alliances and launching new services. In July 1999, a portal alliance with partners Hong Kong Cable & Wireless’s Netvigator and Taiwan’s Kimo was formed so as to enable the three companies to jointly develop the internet market in Greater China. An office in Shanghai was opened in October 1999 to expand the site’s reach to northern China and to launch a content channel specially dedicated to female users.
In the past, Ding Lei strongly supported the Ministry of Information Industry’s regulations banning foreign investment in the domestic internet sector and initially refused foreign investment, relying instead on the proceeds from software sales, advertisements, and sales of computers and digital cameras online. However, he has changed his position more recently. On 28 March 2000, NetEase filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering on the NASDAQ. In order to do so and still comply with the prohibition against foreign investment in China’s internet sector, the company excluded its China-based assets from the listing but offered shares in a sister company.
Ding Lei resigned as CEO of the company and appointed a group of high-level managers with international experience before the company applied to list. According to analysts, this was done to make the company more attractive to international investors, a claim that Ding Lei refutes, offering the desire to do more technical research as the reason for his resignation. This emphasis on technical development is reflected by the channeling of more funds into R&D and the fact that NetEase’s software development team is considered one of the most capable in China. In February 2007, the company unveiled plans to offer a new search engine based on proprietary technology that would challenge Google and Baidu, the market leaders in the internet search market.