Part IThe Story
A Salary of One Thousand Renminbi
The document is one page, and most of the page is empty. It was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as Exhibit 4.4 to an annual report from NetEase.com, Inc. It records an agreement between the company and an employee, identified only as William Ding, to amend paragraph 4(a) of his employment contract. Effective May 1, 2003, his remuneration "will be lowered to Rmb1,000." All other terms remain unchanged. There are two signatures. One is Ding's. The other belongs to Denny Lee, the finance man, signing on behalf of the company.
At the fixed exchange rate of the time, one thousand renminbi came to about $120 a month. That same year, by the reckoning of the people who were just then learning to count Chinese fortunes, the man accepting this salary held roughly 7.6 billion yuan in paper wealth and was the richest person on the Chinese mainland. He was thirty-one. He did not run the company he had founded. His title was chief architect, a job description that sounds like a joke until you look at what he was building. The addendum took effect on International Workers' Day, a coincidence a novelist would cut for being too neat.
Read in isolation, the page looks like a tax arrangement, a gesture of solidarity, or a clerical curiosity, and it may be all three. Read beside the rest of William Ding's paper trail, it starts to look like a signature in a second sense: the characteristic mark of a man who keeps rewriting the terms of his own employment while the underlying ownership stays put. He gave up the chief executive's title in 2000, before he turned twenty-nine. He took it back on November 25, 2005, at RMB 30,000 a month, in a "Second Addendum" that Denny Lee again countersigned. Seventeen years later he quietly resigned as legal representative, general manager, and director of the subsidiary that runs NetEase's news business. He kept 99 percent of its shares.
In the years between those documents he built China's first free email service, survived a Nasdaq trading halt that left his stock worth ninety-five cents, turned a web portal into one of the largest video-game companies on earth, raised pigs to soothing music in the hills of Zhejiang, started and sold an e-commerce company for $2 billion, financed more than a dozen Western game studios in about four years, and then shut most of them down in about two.
There are not many documents like the addendum. Ding gives few interviews and rarely appears at product launches. When he turned up at one in April 2013, a trade reporter noted that he "hasn't showed up at such an event for a long time." Much of what is known about how he thinks comes from filings, from an internal email a former employee leaked onto a microblog, and from a handful of interviews given in the early 2000s, when he was young and briefly famous and had not yet learned to stop talking. The record is thin, and it contradicts itself in small ways. His founding employment agreement is dated August 12, 1999, in one SEC exhibit and August 13 in the next. A 2015 Nikkei forum biography gives his birthday as October 18. Everyone else says October 1.
On the larger questions the record is remarkably consistent. The terms change. The man holding them does not.
By the Numbers
The Ledger of William Ding
RMB 1,000Ding's monthly salary from May 1, 2003, the year he became the mainland's richest man
7.6B yuanEstimated fortune in 2003, making him China's first internet and gaming billionaire
$0.95NetEase's share price when Nasdaq trading resumed on January 2, 2002
940M+Free email users by 2017, the largest such service in China
CN¥112.6BNetEase revenue in 2025, with net income of CN¥33.75 billion
25,423Employees as of March 2026, up from three in June 1997
$38.9BDing's net worth per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, May 2025
Three Stones in Chiang Kai-shek's Hometown
Fenghua is a small, old city on Zhejiang's coast, under the administration of Ningbo. For most of the twentieth century it was known for one son, Chiang Kai-shek, who was born there, fought a civil war from there in a sense, and lost. Ding Lei was born in Fenghua on October 1, 1971, the twenty-second anniversary of the People's Republic whose founding sent Chiang to Taiwan. The town's famous son had been a soldier. This one would take after his father, an engineer at a state research institute, and the heroes he chose as a boy were Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. He told interviewers later that he had wanted to become "an excellent mechanical engineer." It is an oddly modest ambition, phrased the way a schoolteacher would phrase it.
His parents did not approve of computers. One account says they worried the machines would hurt his health, a concern that sounds quaint now and was not unreasonable then, when a computer in a Chinese household was a novelty and a cathode-ray tube a foot from a teenager's face looked like a hazard. He was undeterred. At thirteen he was absorbed in electronics. By sixteen he had gathered parts and assembled six transistor radios. The number matters. One radio is a project. Six is a production run.
He went west to Chengdu, to the Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering, later renamed the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and studied microwave communications. He did not chase grades. The school library held 300,000 volumes on electronics, and he spent his time among the IT books rather than the syllabus. Feng Lin, who supervised his graduation essays and later became dean of the university's Guoteng Software Institute, remembered him with a mix of fondness and mild exasperation that teachers keep for students who turn out well. "He often raised weird questions," Feng said. "And he didn't work like a normal student. He had his own idea on all matters." In another interview the professor was blunter: "Ding Lei was not the top student in his class, but had an enquiring mind and broad interests."
Somewhere in those stacks Ding came across a description of CompuServe, the American dial-up information service and a forerunner of the consumer internet. He understood that it mattered before he understood how it worked. He kept a habit from those years for the rest of his life, studying until midnight, and he said the most important thing college taught him was how to learn on his own.
He graduated in 1993 and went home to Zhejiang, to a job as a technical engineer at the Ningbo Telecommunications Bureau. It was a safe post in a state monopoly, close to his family and to the coast, the kind of job parents who distrust computers hope their son will keep. He kept it for two years and used them to learn TCP/IP, the protocols underneath the internet, at a time when, as a 2004 profile put it, the internet "was still an alien concept in China, even to teachers of computer science." Then he quit.
— William Ding, to China Today, 2004I finally resigned my job and went to Guangzhou in pursuit of personal development. I saw it as the first step towards creating opportunities that could change the course of my life.
His given name, 磊, is written as three copies of the character for stone, 石, stacked into a small pyramid. It means heaped stones, or by extension something solid, upright, and open. People inside the Chinese internet world eventually started calling him Ding Sanshi, Ding Three-Stones, or Brother Sanshi. The nickname fits. Stones are not glamorous. They accumulate, they bear weight, and they stay where they are put.
The Number Everyone Dialed
Guangzhou in the mid-1990s was the place a Zhejiang engineer went if he wanted to be near Hong Kong, foreign capital, and the looser rules of the south. From May 1995 to May 1996 Ding worked as a technical support engineer at the Guangzhou branch of Sybase, the American database company. That meant a foreign salary, foreign software, and exposure to how a Western enterprise vendor sold to Chinese customers. He then spent a year at a small local outfit called Guangzhou Feijie and gave up the good pay. In June 1997 he registered NetEase in Guangzhou. The company's own history says it had three employees. A 2004 profile describes him working out of a small office with two staff and earning his first stake through two years of writing software for other people. Both can be true. Most founding stories have more than one starting line.
The first business was not a website. NetEase sold email servers to internet access providers. Ding was selling the tools before he was selling the destination, and selling to the companies that controlled access rather than to the people who would eventually use it. In November 1997 the company released a bilingual email system, Chinese and English, the first of its kind in China, and licensed it to other internet companies. Only then did NetEase build its own sites: free email, chat rooms, China's first online community, its first personalized information service.
The domain was 163.com. Ding did not invent the number. Before broadband, Chinese users got online by dialing 163, the access code for the national dial-up service. Every person in China who had ever connected to the internet had typed those three digits. Ding took the ritual and made it an address. Typing 163 had meant getting online. Now it also meant getting to NetEase. As user acquisition goes, it is about as close to free as it gets: the habit already existed, and he gave it somewhere to land.
By the end of 1999 NetEase had raised nearly $20 million over two rounds. That year it held an online literature contest judged by Wang Meng, a former minister of culture, the novelist Liu Xinwu, and Mo Yan, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature thirteen years later. Scholars now count the contest among the early sparks of Chinese internet literature. A portal run by a twenty-eight-year-old engineer had persuaded three of the country's most serious writers to judge strangers' prose on a website. It was an early sign of a habit that would recur: Ding liked to put the highest-status thing he could find next to the newest thing he could build and let each lend the other credibility.
On November 29, 1999, the South China Morning Post published an interview with "William Ding Lei, chief executive of Beijing-based Netease." The paper called him "a fresh-faced computer whiz," aged twenty-eight, whose portal had become one of the mainland's top three websites within a year, and "the mainland's equivalent of Jerry Yang." The headline said money had never been his motivation. The reporter, Yvonne Chan, found that claim "refreshing — if a little implausible," and added, deadpan, that Ding "can easily recite the string of international media publications to which he has recently given interviews." It is the only portrait in the record of Ding as a young man performing for the press. It is affectionate and a little unkind, and it reads like a scene from before he learned better.
That same year Forbes Global published a list of China's fifty richest entrepreneurs, compiled by Rupert Hoogewerf, a thirty-year-old Chinese-speaking British accountant who would later turn the exercise into the Hurun Report. Introducing the 2000 edition, the magazine quoted a senior government official explaining how the Party wanted the public to see these new rich: as "part of the overall process, not just in terms of their personal charisma." Forbes added that Chinese business leaders, compared with their peers abroad, "try to keep low profiles and attract little publicity." Ding, still reciting his media list, had not yet absorbed that lesson. He would.
The Chinese press paired him with Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu and Wang Zhidong of Sina as the 网络三剑客, the "Three Swordsmen of the Internet," a phrase from the vocabulary of martial-arts fiction. In September 2000 the metaphor briefly came true. Ding and the heads of China's other major internet companies went to Hangzhou for a "Heaven Silicon Valley Summit" hosted by Jin Yong, the most beloved wuxia novelist in the Chinese language. Ding met the leadership of Zhejiang University and spoke to more than a thousand students about the history of NetEase and the future of the Chinese internet. A NetEase marketing page from that autumn records that he also met the leaders of Zhejiang Province.
He was back in his home province, addressing its flagship university and its government, at the invitation of a man who wrote stories about swordsmen. More than two decades later NetEase would list Hangzhou as its headquarters. In 2000 that was still far off, and the next twelve months were about to go very badly.
Ninety-Five Cents
In March 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble and three months before his company's public offering, Ding stepped down as chief executive and took the title of co-chief technology officer. The board's records state it flatly: interim CEO from July 1999 until April 2000, co-CTO from July 1999 until March 2001. The usual reading is that American investors wanted a professional manager at the top of an American-listed company, and that Ding, an engineer, was willing to hand over a title he had never particularly wanted. He did not hand over control.
NetEase listed on Nasdaq on July 1, 2000. Merrill Lynch underwrote 4.5 million shares at $15.50. The offering had been delayed for months. Beijing was making it difficult for Chinese internet companies to list abroad, and Western investors were nervous about Chinese technology stocks in a market already falling apart. Two days later The New York Times ran the headline: "Nasdaq Debut of Chinese Stock Dampens Internet Fever." The stock slid from its first day.
Then the accounting problem surfaced. On May 8, 2001, NetEase disclosed that one or more employees "may not have correctly reported the terms of several contracts between the company and third-party advertisers" to its finance department. At first management said only the first quarter of 2001 would need revision. A month later the board's audit team was questioning roughly $3 million of revenue that "may have been attributed to incorrect periods during 2000," and warned that the whole year might have to be restated. On a Monday in June 2001 the chief executive, King Lai, and the chief operating officer, Susan Chen, resigned. A ZDNet reporter described the announcement as "a terse statement" from the chairman, William Ding, who became acting CEO and acting COO.
His statement is worth reading for what it does with bad news. "Netease is disappointed by these most recent findings," he said. "However, the depth of the investigation ordered by our board and management has now proven its worth by uncovering possible additional incorrect attributions of revenue beyond those initially suspected. We believe that our thoroughness will benefit our shareholders and help restore confidence in our prospects and financial results." The second sentence does a lot. It turns the discovery of more wrongdoing into evidence of diligence. It is either very good crisis communication or a sincere belief that the truth, fully dug up, is an asset. With Ding it is hard to tell which, and it may not matter.
The company was large and fragile. At least 21.5 million people had used it to create more than 825,800 personal home pages. It hosted 200 community forums and more than 90,000 personal forums started by members. It was also in talks to be sold to i-Cable Communications, the Hong Kong cable operator. Those talks collapsed. On June 19 the International Herald Tribune's tech brief ran four words: "NO SALE FOR NETEASE."
On September 4, 2001, a week before the attacks on New York and Washington, Nasdaq halted trading in NetEase. Ding later called it possibly the darkest day in the company's history. For four months the shares could not be bought or sold. NetEase existed, employed people, and served tens of millions of users, but it had no public price. When trading resumed on January 2, 2002, the stock opened at ninety-five cents.
A Chinese business encyclopedia summarizes what happened next in one sentence that works better than most biographies: 网易没卖成，反倒让丁磊决定静下心来本分地经营网易. NetEase failed to sell, and that made Ding decide to calm down and run NetEase properly. The word 本分 means roughly "within one's proper role," doing what one is supposed to do. The failed sale stripped away every exit and every distraction and left only the business.
That September, while his stock sat frozen, Ding told the press he hoped to rebuild on a few unglamorous things: text-message services, stock quotes on demand, and an online game based on Journey to the West.
— William Ding, quoted in China.org, 2003Life is just like chocolates with liquor, and you never know what's inside.
Within about eighteen months of reopening at ninety-five cents, NetEase traded at $70. In March 2001 Ding had taken the title of chief architect, which he held until November 2005. From June to September 2001 he also served as acting CEO and COO, holding three titles while the company was worth almost nothing. When an interviewer later asked about the rise and fall, the reporter noted that he did not seem excited discussing it and that he said he was "not interested in calculating the rise and fall of businesses on paper." He had just experienced the most dramatic paper rise and fall in Chinese internet history. He seems to have concluded that the paper was the least interesting part.
Westward
There is a piece of policy history that explains a great deal of what followed. In 2000 the Chinese government banned the sale of game consoles, citing concern for young people's health, the same worry Ding's parents had once had about him. The ban did not stop Chinese teenagers from playing games. It sent them to the PC and to the internet café. Cybercafés became the social centers of a generation: places to meet, escape surveillance, and play online games that ran on Chinese servers and were sold by Chinese companies. With consoles gone, the field went to whoever could build a game a teenager would play for four hours in a smoky café in Guangzhou or Chengdu.
NetEase formed NetEase Games in 2001. On December 28 of that year it announced the launch of its own massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Westward Journey Online, built on the sixteenth-century novel about a monk, a monkey king, a pig, and a river spirit traveling west to fetch scripture. A sequel followed in 2002. Then came Fantasy Westward Journey, which by 2006 had reached about 22 million users and averaged more than 400,000 players online at once.
The choice of source material was not incidental. Journey to the West is one of the four great classical novels, owned by everyone and licensed from no one. Its characters were already known to every Chinese child, the same way 163 had already been typed by every Chinese internet user. Ding was again building on a habit that already existed. He did not need to teach anyone who Sun Wukong was. He needed to let them play him.
The game business rescued NetEase and then reshaped it. By 2003 the company had backing from SoftBank, ING Barings, Goldman Sachs, Techpacific.com, and News Corporation. That year Ding became the richest person on the mainland. China Today ran a profile headlined "Self-made Billionaire at 32" and noted that "his bespectacled face and mild expression gives him the look of a young Bill Gates." The magazine also pointed out that he was not yet on the international Forbes list. Domestic sources put his wealth at 7.5 to 7.6 billion yuan. The South China Morning Post later used $2.95 billion. The figures disagree. The ranking does not.
The same profile included a fable Ding told his employees. A mother eagle carries her chick to a cliff and tells it, "You are an eagle. You can fly." The chick says it is afraid. She pushes it off. It falters, spreads its wings, and flies. Ding's point, as the reporter relayed it, was that everyone has potential that "might be obscured by habits and circumstances, or lost with the passage of time." It is a corporate parable and somewhat corny. It is also, almost exactly, what Nasdaq had done to him in September 2001.
The fortune moved around. In Forbes's 2004 China list he ranked 197th, with $668 million. In 2005 he was third, at $1.27 billion, and Forbes added a grim note: the company was "dealing with the death of its widely respected acting chief executive, Ted Sun, in September." Sun had run the company day to day while Ding held the architect's title. Two months after Sun's death, on November 28, 2005, the board appointed Ding chief executive. The second addendum, dated three days earlier and effective November 25, recorded that he had "agreed to serve as Employer's Chief Executive Officer" at RMB 30,000 a month. The language reads less like someone seizing the job than someone agreeing to an assignment. Six years earlier he had given up the title because the market wanted someone else in it. Now it came back to him because the person who held it had died. He has held it ever since.
In 2007 Forbes ranked him 840th among the world's billionaires, at $1.1 billion, and warned that "Ding, who is chief executive, may have to shift again as shares have stalled amid stiff competition." He did shift, and the move he made was a licensing deal rather than an invention. In August 2008 NetEase signed with Blizzard Entertainment to publish its games in China: World of Warcraft, then StarCraft II, then Hearthstone in 2013 and Overwatch in 2015. By 2012 NetEase had revenue of $1.3 billion, and 89 percent of it came from online games, either developed in-house or licensed from Blizzard. The portal that had named itself after a dial-up code had become a game company with a news site attached.
In February 2015 NetEase opened its first U.S. office, in the San Francisco Bay Area. In March it released a mobile version of Fantasy Westward Journey. Within two hours it was the top free game on the chart. In its first year it reached 60 million registered users and a peak of more than two million playing at once. The game that had saved the company in the cybercafé era did it again on the smartphone. It was still the same story: the monkey, the monk, the pig, the long road west.
Zero Points for EasyChat
On November 14, 2013, the team behind EasyChat, a mobile messaging app NetEase had built with China Telecom to compete with Tencent's WeChat, received a reply from their chief executive about the product's architecture. A former employee later posted the email on his microblog, and it was partly translated by TechNode. It is the most revealing document in the Ding record after the salary addendum, and it may be the funniest.
He began with an argument. The team had built EasyChat around "social networking among acquaintances," and he thought the premise was wrong. People who already know each other, he wrote, "only chat when there are absolute necessities, such as getting friends to do things for you." Social energy runs between people who don't know each other well but share an interest. He had evidence: "More than 200 girls posted 4,000 to 5,000 messages in a shopping group of EasyChat in a single day, that's because they share similar interests." Then he graded the market.
— William Ding, internal email to the EasyChat team, November 14, 2013For similar products, 5 points for WeChat, 4 points for MoMo, 0 points for EasyChat, and negative for Laiwang. Show me a new version of EasyChat that worth at least 6 points.
Laiwang was Alibaba's messaging app, then the subject of a much-publicized "all in" push by Jack Ma's company. Ding gave it a negative score. He gave his own team's product zero. He set the bar one point above WeChat, which had reportedly passed 600 million users. Then he softened it, in a line that reads as both kind and very tired: "Don't be too harsh on yourselves, cause I am under much more pressure from our partner Telecom."
The email captures a style of management that rarely survives at companies with tens of thousands of employees. The founder still uses the products. He forms specific opinions about them, scores competitors on a simple scale, and sends the results straight to the engineers with a mix of brutality and comfort. EasyChat never reached six points. WeChat won the messaging war. The way of thinking in the email, though, showed up elsewhere with better results.
Seven months earlier Ding had appeared, unusually, at the launch of NetEase Cloud Music. He told the room he was a fan of most genres, though not rock, and that he had once wanted to start a record label after the 2000 listing. He had tried the existing music services and found them lacking. "There are products by Baidu, Tencent and others, but those are not what I want," he said. "Why don't you create music software with social features enabling music sharing with more people? People said that Spotify was capable of it. But I don't think it's very easy to use after having played with it for a while." It was the EasyChat grading system again, applied to the whole world's music industry by someone who had actually used the products.
To run Cloud Music he brought back Whang Lei, a former NetEase employee then working on the music service at iQiyi, the Baidu-backed video platform. Whang's story echoes Ding's own: a technologist who had left, gained experience elsewhere, and was persuaded to return because the founder wanted a specific product and trusted him to build it. The service started slowly, with a reported 45,000 registered users in its first month, and no ads or paid tiers. Ding wanted more than a Spotify clone. He wanted DJ playlists, audiobooks, and a platform where independent musicians could publish without a label.
That last goal became the strategy. Tencent signed the three major labels. NetEase went after everyone else. By 2018 more than 70,000 independent artists had uploaded more than 1.2 million songs to Cloud Music. It signed Kobalt in December 2017 and the indie-label network Merlin in November 2018. Tencent sued NetEase for copyright infringement in 2014 and used the suit to push NetEase into sublicensing deals. Angela Huyue Zhang, in High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, notes that the resulting arrangement became a template for the whole Chinese online music industry. In September 2019 Alibaba invested $700 million for a minority stake. By the end of that year Cloud Music had passed 800 million registered users. On December 2, 2021, it listed separately on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The scoring went in both directions, and Ding was as willing to sell his own products as he was to dismiss a rival's. In January 2011 NetEase launched a luxury-goods site, L.163.com, and closed it in December, eleven months later. In 2015 it launched NetEase Comics, signed a deal with Marvel two years later to create Chinese superheroes, built the platform to more than 2,000 series and 40 million users, and sold the business to Bilibili at the end of 2018 while keeping the Marvel copyrights. It started a blog service in 2006, shut it in 2018, and moved users to Lofter, the subculture and fan-fiction platform it had launched in 2011. In January 2015 it launched Kaola, a cross-border e-commerce site selling imported goods to Chinese consumers, which competed directly with Alibaba and JD.com. In November 2015 Ding told Nikkei that cross-border e-tailing had a bright future in China. In September 2019 he sold Kaola to Alibaba for $2 billion. He seems to have meant both statements. A bright future is something you can build and something you can sell.
Pigs That Listen to Music
In 2009 Ding announced that he intended to modernize pig farming in China. Reuters covered it in November under the headline "China web tycoon thrives on portals, pig farms," which made the whole idea sound slightly absurd. Some of the coverage suggested it started with a disappointing meal. In any case, he followed through.
In 2011 NetEase's agricultural affiliate, Weiyang, opened a farm in Anji county, Huzhou, in the hills of Zhejiang, his home province again. The facility had tracking sensors, data analysis, artificial intelligence, Wi-Fi, and music played to keep the animals calm. The public could follow the pigs online. In November 2016 NetEase held an online auction of three Jeju Black pigs and sold them for a combined $75,000, about $25,000 a pig. In 2017 Sinovation Ventures, Meituan-Dianping, and JD.com together invested about $23 million, which trade press described as the first venture round in Chinese farming. By 2018 the Anji site was raising and slaughtering 20,000 organic free-range hogs a year. A second farm opened in Gao'an, Jiangxi, in October 2017. In September 2019 NetEase said it would spend 1.5 billion yuan, about $211 million, on a farm in Shaoxing, also in Zhejiang. The pork is sold on Yanxuan, NetEase's private-label e-commerce brand, launched in 2015.
The tech press treated it as a punchline for years. "Netease Expanding into the Pork Business… Wait, What?" read one 2012 headline. A 2016 piece: "One of China's biggest game companies has a pork farm. Seriously." The company was careful to say the farm was "not meant to become a major arm" of the business. It is an experiment in technology and environmental sustainability, held at a scale small enough not to matter to the stock and large enough to be real.
Something more serious runs underneath. Ding has talked about bringing farmers who lost their land to factories back into agriculture, sending some of the country's capital back to the countryside, and using organic methods to produce food people can trust. A man from a small coastal city who made his money selling escape to teenagers in cybercafés has spent part of his fortune on the oldest Chinese business there is: raising pigs in the hills near where he grew up. The pig appears in Journey to the West too. Zhu Bajie, the gluttonous, lazy, oddly lovable pilgrim, travels west with the monkey. The parallel may be unintended, but it is hard to miss.
Education came next, and it fit the same pattern of large, slow social problems handled by a company that could afford patience. In October 2013 NetEase partnered with Coursera on a Chinese-language portal. Ding had a team translate American university lectures into Mandarin subtitles. In 2014 NetEase launched its own online course platform. Its dictionary and search spinoff, Youdao, originally launched in December 2007 to replace a Google search partnership dating to 2000, became an education company and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019. A 2003 profile noted that he liked to recruit personally from his alma mater and invested time and money in training employees. Feng Lin's odd student had become an odd teacher.
In 2019 the TechBuzz China podcast tried to summarize NetEase and reached for the company's own philosophy: Ding believed "a company doesn't need a direction or specific labels." An outsider could take that as a lack of strategy. It reads better as refusing to let a category limit what the company is allowed to try. NetEase has been an email company, a portal, a game publisher, a music streamer, an importer, a comic-book publisher, a school, and a pig farmer. The common thread is not a market. It is the man scoring the products.
The Front Office Empties
By the 2010s Ding held public roles that a Western founder would not recognize as business positions. He served as a representative to the 11th Guangdong Provincial People's Congress and as a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Those are the ordinary obligations of a very rich private citizen in a one-party state, and they mark a relationship that runs in both directions. In October 2020 the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered NetEase's news app into "rectification" and temporarily suspended some comment functions after censors found what they called inappropriate comments.
That year also brought two transactions that read differently side by side. On June 11, 2020, NetEase completed a secondary listing in Hong Kong under the ticker 9999, and the shares closed more than 5 percent higher on the first day. The company that had nearly vanished from Nasdaq now had a second home closer to the mainland, a hedge against an American market that was turning against Chinese issuers. The same month Ding bought a 16,000-square-foot house in Bel Air, Los Angeles, for $29 million from Elon Musk, who was then selling his houses. A Chinese listing and a California mansion, acquired within weeks: a man covering both sides.
Then the regulatory climate changed. From July 2021 Beijing froze approvals for new video games for about nine months. New rules limited how long minors could play and tightened content standards on sexuality, morality, and religion. Across the Chinese technology industry founders stepped back from visible roles. In April 2022 corporate-registry trackers found that Ding had resigned as legal representative, general manager, and director of Beijing NetEase Media, the entity that runs NetEase News. He was replaced by Li Li, chief executive of the Cayman-incorporated NetEase Media. The company called it "normal" business operations. Ding was fifty, ranked 49th on the Forbes global list at $27.7 billion, and held 99 percent of the subsidiary's shares. In July 2022 he gave up his roles as legal representative and executive chairman of Shanghai NetEase Network Technology Development, a gaming affiliate, days after Xiaomi's Lei Jun stepped back from his own company's gaming unit.
Western readers sometimes interpret moves like these as retreat or surrender. Ding had been doing this since March 2000. He had given up titles to calm Nasdaq, taken them back when the company needed him, and run the company for years as an "architect" paid a nominal salary. Giving up the legal representative's signature was a smaller version of the same move under different pressure. The front office emptied. The cap table did not change.
The year's biggest break came from outside. On November 17, 2022, Activision Blizzard and NetEase announced that their fourteen-year licensing partnership, signed in August 2008, would end in January because the companies could not agree on renewal terms. NetEase's Hong Kong shares fell 9 percent that day. NetEase said the Blizzard titles contributed only "low single digits" of revenue and profit. Ding's statement said the companies had "material differences on key terms," and then addressed the players rather than the investors.
— William Ding, statement on the end of the Blizzard partnership, November 17, 2022We will continue our promise to serve our players well until the last minute. We will make sure our players' data and assets are well protected in all of our games.
On January 23, 2023, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch, StarCraft, Diablo III, Warcraft III: Reforged, and Heroes of the Storm went dark in China. Blizzard's president, Mike Ybarra, said the company was "looking for alternatives to bring our games back to players in the future." It found one in April 2024, after Microsoft closed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard: the same partner, NetEase. The new agreement also put NetEase titles on Xbox. A New York Times headline that month said the two companies had "settled their beef." Like the failed i-Cable sale in 2001, the breakup ended with Ding still in place, doing what he had been doing before.
The Studios and the Stones
During the years his front office was emptying in China, Ding was filling one abroad. Between 2020 and early 2024 NetEase spent heavily in Japan, Europe, and North America, and the list reads like a roster of the global game industry's veteran creators.
In June 2020 Ryosuke Yoshida, formerly of Capcom, opened Ouka Studios in Tokyo with NetEase money. In October 2021 NetEase bought Grasshopper Manufacture, the cult Japanese studio, from GungHo. When Devolver Digital listed in London in November 2021, NetEase took 8 percent. In January 2022 Toshihiro Nagoshi and a group of former Sega developers founded Nagoshi Studio. In May 2022 Jack Emmert founded Jackalope Games in Austin and later signed a Warhammer partnership with Games Workshop. In July 2022 Jerry Hook, a Halo veteran, founded Jar of Sparks. In August NetEase bought Quantic Dream in Paris outright, after a minority investment in 2019. It put $13.2 million into Jeff Gardiner's Something Wicked Games, took minority stakes in Christofer Sundberg's Liquid Swords in Stockholm and Konrad Tomaszkiewicz's Rebel Wolves in Warsaw, and funded Hiroyuki Kobayashi's GPTRACK50 in Osaka. In 2023 came SkyBox Labs, Spliced, Studio Flare, Anchor Point, Sean Crooks's Bad Brain in Toronto, Dragon Quest producer Ryutaro Ichimura's PinCool in Tokyo, and T-Minus Zero in Austin, staffed by Bethesda and BioWare veterans. In November 2023 Greg Street, a longtime Blizzard designer, founded Fantastic Pixel Castle to build a AAA MMO. Mac Walters, a Mass Effect writer, founded Worlds Untold. In February 2024 David Vonderhaar, a Treyarch veteran, opened BulletFarm in Los Angeles.
Taken together, these founders form a pattern that echoes Ding himself. Each was an engineer or designer who had built someone else's empire, left a safe position, and gone out with outside money to make something of their own. Ding knew that path: the Ningbo Telecommunications Bureau, Sybase, a small Guangzhou office with two employees. Greg Street's case is the sharpest. In 2023 the Blizzard games went dark in China. In November 2023 Ding's company funded a former Blizzard designer to build an MMO, the genre that had saved NetEase in 2001.
Then the correction began. In August 2024 NetEase closed Ouka Studios after the release of Visions of Mana. Worlds Untold paused in November 2024. Jar of Sparks stopped work in January 2025. On February 21, 2025, Bloomberg ran the headline "NetEase's Billionaire CEO Slashes Jobs and Games in Profit Push." In August 2025 NetEase closed T-Minus Zero and sold it in September. In early November 2025 it closed Fantastic Pixel Castle and Bad Brain and ended its partnership with Jackalyptic, which had been building the Warhammer MMO. "Devastated doesn't even begin to cover it," the Jackalyptic team wrote. Street's statement was quieter: "While we'd love to make our game, our first priority is to help our developers find employment." Anchor Point went independent in February 2026. PinCool's first game came out through another publisher. Grasshopper chose to self-publish. GPTRACK50 went to Sega. A NetEase spokesman said Nagoshi Studio would lose funding from May 2026 and that its game, Gang of Dragon, still needed another $44 million to finish. That same year Mattel bought out NetEase's half of their joint studio, Mattel163, founded in January 2018, for $159 million.
The press described an industry earthquake and NetEase's wish for a smaller, tighter portfolio to compete with Tencent and miHoYo's Genshin Impact. The founders described something more personal. NetEase, characteristically, said very little.
In the middle of the retreat came the strangest episode. In March 2024 NetEase and Marvel Games announced Marvel Rivals, a team-based hero shooter built in China using American characters. It launched in December 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S, drew 10 million registered users in three days, and passed 40 million players by February 2025. It was the company's biggest Western success. IGN reported in February 2025 that Ding had nearly canceled it during development, because it did not use original intellectual property.
That detail runs against easy lessons. The man who built his company on a classical novel nobody owned, who had seen fourteen years of Blizzard revenue disappear when a licensor walked away, and who held onto the Marvel copyrights when he sold the comics business to Bilibili, almost killed his biggest global hit because it belonged to someone else. He was wrong about the game and right about the risk. Both are on the record. Neither cancels the other.
The core business barely noticed the turmoil. In 2023 NetEase reported 103.5 billion yuan in revenue, $14.6 billion, with 81.6 billion from games. Eggy Party, a casual multiplayer game, passed 500 million registered players and topped 40 million daily users over the Lunar New Year. The Justice franchise passed 100 million active users. In the earnings release Ding praised the company's "ability to bring players dynamic and original products in multiple genres" and pointed to "our MMO roots." In 2025 revenue reached CN¥112.6 billion, with operating income of CN¥35.83 billion and net income of CN¥33.75 billion. In May 2025 Bloomberg estimated his fortune at $38.9 billion. In October 2025 the Hurun list, the successor to Rupert Hoogewerf's 1999 exercise, ranked him sixth among China's male entrepreneurs, at 320 billion yuan. Headquarters are in Hangzhou, where in September 2000 a young chairman in Jin Yong's company told a thousand Zhejiang University students about the future. The farms are in Anji and Shaoxing. Fenghua is about a two-hour drive. The stones were never far from where they started.
The address is still 163.com. Nobody in China dials 163 to get online anymore, and the number now connects mainly to a company that adopted it before most of its users were born. The founder's title has changed half a dozen times since that number was first typed into a browser. The documents that recorded those changes are still in the SEC's archive, single pages with two signatures and a lot of white space, each ending with the same sentence.
All other terms in the Employment Agreement shall remain unchanged.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below are drawn from what William Ding did rather than what he said. He has said very little, and some of what circulates under his name online is invented. Each principle rests on documented decisions from Part I: filings, licensing deals, launches, shutdowns, and the one internal email that leaked. Some are uncomfortable, and at least one describes an expensive mistake. Ding's career is useful because it holds a near-collapse, a reinvention, a long run of compounding, and a sharp contraction, and the same habits show up in all four.
The principles
- 1.Separate the title from the control.
- 2.Sell the tools before you build the destination.
- 3.Build on a habit the user already has.
- 4.When the exit closes, run the business.
- 5.Follow the cash engine, not the category.
- 6.Score products out loud, including your own.
- 7.Serve the supply side the incumbent ignores.
- 8.Build without sentiment, sell without regret.
- 9.Keep long-dated bets small enough to survive patience.
- 10.Reduce your visible surface when the weather turns.
- 11.Own what you can't afford to lose, and know when you're wrong about it.
- 12.Price the retreat into the expansion.
Principle 1
Separate the title from the control
Ding's résumé at NetEase is unusual among founders: interim CEO, then co-CTO, then chief architect, then acting CEO and COO for three months, then architect again, then CEO from November 2005. Later came the 2022 resignations from the legal-representative posts at subsidiaries where he still owned nearly everything. For more than five of the company's most critical years, its founder and controlling shareholder worked under a technical title at a nominal salary, RMB 1,000 a month from May 2003, while professional managers took the public questions.
The usual founder instinct is to hold onto the CEO title as proof of control. Ding treated the title as a tool that could be given to whoever best absorbed outside pressure at the moment: Nasdaq investors in 2000, a respected operator like Ted Sun before 2005, an appointed media executive under Beijing's scrutiny in 2022. What he kept was the equity and the right to step back in. When the company needed him, as in June 2001 or November 2005, he returned without needing to rebuild authority, because it had never left.
磊
The Titles of William Ding
Every title changed. The controlling stake didn't.
1997
Founds NetEase in Guangzhou with a handful of employees.
1999
Director and interim CEO from July; employment agreement signed in August.
2000
Gives up CEO in March to become co-CTO; IPO on Nasdaq July 1.
2001
Chief architect from March; acting CEO and COO June to September after executive resignations.
2003
Salary cut to RMB 1,000 per month effective May 1; becomes the mainland's richest man.
2005
Agrees to serve as CEO at RMB 30,000 per month, effective November 25.
2022
Resigns as legal representative of Beijing NetEase Media (April) and a Shanghai gaming affiliate (July).
Tactic: Decide which of your roles are about control and which are about absorbing pressure, and be willing to hand off the second kind to whoever handles that pressure best this year.
Principle 2
Sell the tools before you build the destination
NetEase's first customers were not users. They were internet access providers who bought email servers. The bilingual email system launched in November 1997 was licensed to other Chinese internet companies before NetEase built its own portal around it. Ding had spent a year doing technical support for Sybase, an enterprise vendor, and he started his company the way an enterprise vendor would: selling infrastructure to the businesses that controlled access, earning cash and learning the technology on someone else's budget.
This sequence lowers risk. The B2B business pays for itself while the consumer business is still a guess. The technology gets tested by paying customers who complain precisely. When the consumer product launches, it runs on software that already works. China Today's account of Ding earning "his first nest egg after two years of hard work writing software" describes the same discipline in personal terms.
Tactic: If your consumer product depends on hard infrastructure, find someone who will pay for that infrastructure first and let them fund your learning.
Principle 3
Build on a habit the user already has
The domain 163.com came from the national dial-up access code that every Chinese internet user had already typed. Westward Journey came from a sixteenth-century novel every Chinese child already knew. Fantasy Westward Journey moved to mobile in 2015 and hit number one in two hours because its audience already existed. Minecraft in China passed 100 million users by May 2018. Again and again Ding's biggest wins came from attaching a product to something the user already did or already loved, rather than asking for a new behavior.
This is different from copying. Ding rarely copied a product. He borrowed a ritual: the three digits, the monkey king, the block world. Acquisition costs fall sharply when the user doesn't have to learn anything to arrive.
Tactic: Before designing onboarding, list the habits, words, and stories your users already carry, and build your entry point on one of them.
Principle 4
When the exit closes, run the business
By September 2001 NetEase had a restatement, two resigned top executives, a collapsed sale to i-Cable, and a Nasdaq trading halt. The Chinese business literature describes his response with the word 本分: doing one's proper work. With no sale available, Ding turned to the dullest revenue he could find: SMS, stock quotes, and an online game. The stock reopened at ninety-five cents on January 2, 2002, and traded at $70 about eighteen months later.
The lesson is not resilience in the abstract. An available exit distorts decisions. While a buyer is at the table, management optimizes for the sale. When the buyer leaves, the only thing left to optimize is the business. Ding's 2001 statement framed the expanding audit as evidence of "thoroughness," a sign that he had stopped managing perception and started managing reality.
Tactic: When a fundraise or sale falls through, give yourself a fixed period to plan as though no exit will ever come, and see what that plan says to build.
Principle 5
Follow the cash engine, not the category
NetEase began as an email-and-portal company. By 2007 Forbes summarized it as having "shifted most of its business to online gaming." By 2012 games produced 89 percent of revenue. A founder attached to his original category would have defended the portal. Ding let the money show him what the company was and reorganized around it, keeping the portal, the news app, and email as useful assets rather than the identity.
TechBuzz China's summary of Ding's view, that a company "doesn't need a direction or specific labels," explains how this worked. Without a fixed label, there was nothing to protect when the revenue moved. The 2000 console ban and the cybercafé culture it produced handed the market to PC online games, and NetEase was free to go where the players went.
Tactic: Every year, rank your business lines by contribution and ask whether the company's description still matches the top line. If it doesn't, change the description.
Principle 6
Score products out loud, including your own
The November 2013 EasyChat email gave WeChat five points, MoMo four, EasyChat zero, and Alibaba's Laiwang a negative score, then asked the team for a version worth six. It is a short management system: a common scale, an honest baseline, a specific target above the market leader, and an argument (strangers with shared interests generate more social activity than acquaintances) backed by the team's own data. It ends with a line taking the pressure on himself.
The same habit appears at the Cloud Music launch, where Ding said he'd used Spotify and didn't find it easy. A founder who personally uses competing products and turns his reactions into numbers gives his teams something more useful than encouragement. The willingness to give his own product zero is what makes the other scores believable.
Tactic: Have your leadership score your product and its three closest competitors on one simple scale, put your own score in writing, and set a target one point above the best rival.
Principle 7
Serve the supply side the incumbent ignores
Tencent locked up the three major record labels. NetEase Cloud Music courted independent artists, and by 2018 more than 70,000 had uploaded over 1.2 million songs, with non-exclusive deals with Kobalt and Merlin adding depth. That made Cloud Music the home of discovery and community rather than a smaller version of Tencent's catalog. It reached 800 million registered users by the end of 2019 and drew a $700 million investment from Alibaba.
When an incumbent controls the obvious suppliers, the long tail of smaller suppliers is often undervalued, because they cost more to aggregate and look small one at a time. Ding's goal at launch, a platform where independent musicians could publish without a label, turned that weakness into the product.
Tactic: List the suppliers your largest competitor has locked up, then list the ones they ignore, and design your offer for the second group.
Principle 8
Build without sentiment, sell without regret
Ding's record of exits is as long as his record of launches, and he seems to treat both as ordinary operations. L.163.com lived eleven months. Kaola was built from January 2015 and sold to Alibaba for $2 billion in 2019, four years after he told Nikkei cross-border e-commerce had a bright future. The comics business went to Bilibili while NetEase kept the Marvel copyrights. The blog moved its users to Lofter. Mattel163 went to Mattel for $159 million.
↺
Built, Then Released
A sample of NetEase businesses Ding launched and later sold, spun off, or shut down.
| Business | Launched | Outcome | Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| L.163.com (luxury e-commerce) | January 2011 | Closed December 2011 | Shut |
| NetEase Blog | September 2006 | Closed 2018; users moved to Lofter | Migrated |
| NetEase Comics | 2015 | Sold to Bilibili, late 2018; Marvel copyrights kept | Sold |
| Kaola (cross-border e-commerce) | January 2015 | Sold to Alibaba for $2B, 2019 | Sold |
| Youdao (search, then education) | December 2007 | Listed on NYSE, 2019 | Spun out |
| NetEase Cloud Music | April 2013 | Listed in Hong Kong, December 2, 2021 | Spun out |
| Mattel163 | January 2018 | Stake sold to Mattel for $159M, 2026 | Sold |
The discipline is to see a business as an asset with a value that may be higher in someone else's hands, especially a rival's. Selling Kaola to Alibaba, the company it was built to compete with, required no hurt pride, only a clear view of where the asset was worth most.
Tactic: For every business line, write down who would value it more than you do and at what price, and revisit the list each year without defending the original reasons for building it.
Principle 9
Keep long-dated bets small enough to survive patience
The pig farms were announced in 2009, opened in Anji in 2011, mocked through the 2010s, and capitalized with outside venture money in 2017. By 2019 they justified a 1.5 billion yuan commitment in Shaoxing. Throughout, NetEase described the operation as "not meant to become a major arm" of the company. That sizing is the strategy. A bet on food safety and rural revitalization pays off over decades, and a decades-long bet survives only if it is too small to threaten the quarterly numbers.
Education followed the same pattern: the Coursera partnership in 2013, translated lectures, a course platform in 2014, and eventually Youdao as a listed education company. Ding's side bets went after large, slow social problems such as food, learning, and rural employment, and he gave each one enough capital to be real and not so much that it could sink the company.
Tactic: Fund your most patient bets at a level where you could fund them for ten years without explaining them to anyone, and keep them separate from the core business's targets.
Principle 10
Reduce your visible surface when the weather turns
In April and July 2022, during the game-approval freeze and the broader tightening on Chinese technology, Ding resigned as legal representative and director of the media subsidiary and a gaming affiliate. NetEase called it normal operations. His ownership of the media entity, 99 percent, did not change. By then NetEase had also added a Hong Kong listing in June 2020, so it had a second market if the American one closed.
This is Principle 1 applied to political rather than market pressure. The legal representative's signature is a point of personal exposure. Removing it lowers the founder's profile without changing who decides. Forbes noted back in 2000 that Chinese business leaders "try to keep low profiles." Ding learned this after his media-friendly youth and practiced it whenever pressure rose.
Tactic: Map every place your name appears as a signatory, officer, or public face, and decide in advance which ones you would hand off if scrutiny rose.
Principle 11
Own what you can't afford to lose, and know when you're wrong about it
Ding's company has repeatedly been hurt by depending on other people's intellectual property. The fourteen-year Blizzard partnership ended in November 2022 over "material differences on key terms," and seven franchises went dark in China on January 23, 2023. When he sold the comics business, he kept the Marvel copyrights. His founding hit was based on a public-domain classic. In the 2023 earnings release he emphasized "original products" and the company's "MMO roots."
The counterexample is Marvel Rivals. IGN reported that Ding nearly canceled it because it used licensed rather than original IP. It became the company's biggest Western success, with 40 million players by February 2025. The principle stands: dependence on a licensor is a real risk, as 2023 showed. A principle applied too rigidly, though, would have killed a hit. The skill is weighing that risk against the opportunity, not refusing everything you don't own.
Tactic: For every major product built on someone else's IP, write down what happens the day the license ends, and approve the project only if the upside justifies that scenario.
Principle 12
Price the retreat into the expansion
From 2020 to early 2024 NetEase backed or bought more than a dozen Western and Japanese studios led by well-known veterans. From August 2024 through 2026 it closed, paused, sold, or defunded most of them: Ouka, Worlds Untold, Jar of Sparks, T-Minus Zero, Fantastic Pixel Castle, Bad Brain, Jackalyptic, and Nagoshi Studio, whose game still needed $44 million. The goal was a tighter portfolio to compete with Tencent and miHoYo.
⌁
The Studio Cycle
Selected NetEase-backed studios: founding and fate.
| Studio | Founded or backed | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Ouka Studios (Tokyo) | June 2020 | Closed Aug 2024 |
| Nagoshi Studio (Tokyo) | January 2022 | Defunded May 2026 |
| Jar of Sparks (Los Angeles) | July 2022 | Paused Jan 2025 |
| Quantic Dream (Paris) | Acquired August 2022 | Retained |
| T-Minus Zero (Austin) | August 2023 | Closed and sold 2025 |
| Fantastic Pixel Castle | November 2023 | Closed Nov 2025 |
| Anchor Point (Seattle/Barcelona) | April 2023 | Independent 2026 |
This principle is a caution as much as a method. The speed of the reversal saved NetEase money and hurt a lot of people. Greg Street's statement that his "first priority is to help our developers find employment" is the human cost of the expansion. Ding's method has always included sharp reversals, and the studio founders were not working under the same assumptions he was. The lesson for operators is to decide the conditions for retreat before the expansion begins, and to tell partners plainly what those conditions are.
Tactic: Before funding any new unit, write down the specific metrics and date that would trigger shutting it down, and share that standard with its leaders on the first day.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— William Ding, to students at his alma mater, quoted by China.orgPeople who want to be strong always create opportunities. Smart guys seize opportunities and never let them slip between their fingers. And those who think themselves weak always wait for opportunities.
— William Ding, on what NetEase is, quoted by China.orgIt is a responsibility. A responsibility for investors, clients, users, employees, and the Internet.
— William Ding, at the launch of NetEase Cloud Music, April 2013There are products by Baidu, Tencent and others, but those are not what I want. Why don't you create music software with social features enabling music sharing with more people? People said that Spotify was capable of it. But I don't think it's very easy to use after having played with it for a while.
— William Ding, statement on NetEase's audit, June 2001The depth of the investigation ordered by our board and management has now proven its worth by uncovering possible additional incorrect attributions of revenue beyond those initially suspected. We believe that our thoroughness will benefit our shareholders and help restore confidence in our prospects and financial results.
— William Ding, quoted by China.orgNothing is easy if one has no idea of where to go.
Maxims
- Titles are tools; equity is control. Give up the job that absorbs pressure and keep the stake that makes decisions.
- Borrow the ritual, not the product. The cheapest users are the ones whose existing habits already lead to you.
- Sell infrastructure first. Let paying business customers fund the technology your consumer product will need.
- A closed exit focuses the mind. When no buyer is coming, the only thing left to build is the business.
- Let revenue name the company. Be willing to become whatever the cash engine says you are.
- Grade everything, starting with your own. A zero you give yourself makes the other scores believable.
- Court the suppliers the giant ignores. The overlooked long tail can become the product.
- Build without sentiment and sell without regret. A business may be worth more to a rival than to you.
- Keep patient bets small. A ten-year experiment survives only if it can't hurt the quarter.
- Write down the retreat before you expand. Reversals that come without warning cost the people who trusted you.
