Ma Huateng: Tencent Holdings Chairman & CEO

Ma Huateng was born on October 29, 1971, in Chaoyang District, Shantou, Guangdong, China. He graduated from Shenzhen University. 

In 1998, Ma co-founded Tencent. Its first offering Tencent QQ, an instant messaging tool became very popular in China. The company soon expanded and is now one of the top three Chinese internet companies along with Alibaba and Baidu. 

Tencent’s QQ instant messaging reached a total of 784 million active users by end of September 2012. This was an increase of 10 percent over the previous year. The company’s mobile messaging application, WeChat, has surpassed 200 million by the end of 2012. Tencent’s diverse services include web portals, e-commerce, and multiplayer online games. Online game like Legend of Yulong and Legend of Xuanyuan increased revenue by over one half up to $5.1 billion, with a $1.5 billion profit margin. 

Ma is also known as Pony Ma and in 2007 and 2014 was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential people. With a net worth of $18.8 billion as of January 2016, Ma is one of the top 100 richest people in the world. 

The Right Choice

While Cisco was in place before the internet started to take off, it had a very shaky start as the founders of the company eventually left in not very good terms. The company managed to grow and its then president John Morgridge made a fateful decision, he hired a man by the name of John T. Chambers to be the senior vice president of World Wide Operations in 1990.

This turned out to be a great choice; with Morgridge’s backing Chambers became the company CEO in 1995. Like other tech companies Cisco’s stocks were overinflated; it became the most valuable company in the world in 2001. When the dot.com bubble burst the company’s value went down dramatically.  Chambers resorted to cutting workforce and taking a pay cut himself. He stood his ground and continued growing the company and making strategic acquisitions.

His management skills can be seen in the numbers that he produced. In 1995 when he took over as CEO annual sales was at $1.2 billion, today they are in the $40 billion level.  Cisco has maintained its leadership providing routers and other products that keep the internet humming.  Chambers also became chairman of the board in 2006.

As a sign of continuously adapting to new environment Chambers embarked the company on a new management approach that is decentralized in nature and has been happy to share it with other large companies as well. They have seen increased productivity with this approach. Of course the technologies used to enable this change involve using Cisco products.  Chambers has always been innovative but also keeps his eyes on the ball.