• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1290 0

in 2001, trading in the shares was stopped due to financial disclosure problems. Ding Lei was remembering those times when he said, “At the time I was in a dilemma, and even thought of selling NetEase at one point. The reason I didn’t is not because I would not be able to sell, but because our audit had problems and people were not willing to buy.” Even with his back to the wall, Ding Lei quickly scoured for opportunities. He soon announced that he was investing in an Internet game called “Journey to the West,” since a movie of the same name was well received by college students at the time. He also developed a “Short Messaging Service (SMS)” together with mobile telephone companies. Although he lost another 200 million renminbi that year, the Internet game and the SMS business saved this young man. He was later to say in a speech to college students, “Before I turned thirty, my biggest achievement was not that I had made two or three hundred million renminbi, but that I had gained the experience of losing two or three hundred million.”

It was a tough time. The Internet economy had happily overturned the old business models of corporate growth and the old rules of wealth accumulation, but in the ten years to come, the eternal business laws were to reassertthemselves,ofteninamosttragicanddirectway.Theyconfirmedthat all those who want to succeed must, as always, pass through the fire. Crisis is the best teacher and for many, the hardship was worth the end result. After twoyearsoflittleaction,thegoldenyearsoftheInternetseemedtoreappear. At the time when many of China’s enterprises were facing SARS and other problems, China’s Internet economy began to reappear in embryonic form.

On October 10, 2003, the share price of NetEase reached its historical high of US$70.27. This was a rise of 617% over the company’s price at the beginning of the year, and it was 108 times the price on September 1, 2001. Ding Lei’s wealth on paper now exceeded RMB 5 billion, making him the first Chinese Internet entrepreneur to become the richest person in China. This quantifying of wealth highlighted the new business reality: Not only could wealth be generated in a very short time, but also young, progressive entrepreneurs had become a major force in business. The power equations in China had shifted.

Alibaba exemplified this in the realm of e-commerce. The appearance of SARS in early 2003 had put this company through a severe test. An Alibaba employee attended the Canton (Guangzhou) Fair as part of her business responsibilities, only to discover on return that she had contracted SARS. All five hundred employees in Alibaba were immediately quarantined and normal operations of the company were shut down. Everyone had to work from home. Paradoxically, this proved to be a turning point for the development of China’s e-commerce. Normal business requires personal meetings, generally conducted over a meal. Since this was suddenly impossible, many enterprises began to rely on the Internet to sustain contact and seek business. Alibaba’s volume increased and the company became China’s largest Internet company in the space of four years.

In May 2004, Chen Tian-qiao, then in his thirties, made his company, Shanda Interactive Entertainment, public on NASDAQ in the United States. Within the space of one night, he too became one of the richest people in China, after which he made the unexpected move of buying Sina. Back in 1999, he quit his job, and rented three small rooms in Pudong where he developed a graphic interface Internet game. It was not well received, but by becoming the agent of the Korean game called “The Legend of Mir,” his company was able to make so much money that the market value of Shanda shares reached US$3.5 billion. His own personal wealth reached RMB 9 billion. The whole process took less than five years.

Baidu was another success story, and one that employed a uniquely Chinese strategy. Google was the global king in the realm of search engines. If we describe Google as an imported potted orchid, then Baidu can be compared to a tree growing