Ma Huateng was born in Chaoyang, Guangdong in 1971. After graduating with a computer science degree from Shenzhen University in 1993, he joined Runxun Communication Development Co., a Shenzhen technology firm, where he worked as a software engineer. Four years later, he left Runxun to form his own company, Tencent, with his childhood friend Zhang Zhidong.

Tencent started as a small independent company, but Ma had a strong drive to create new and innovative products for the communications market. This drive led to Tencent's big break - the release of their signature product, the QQ instant message platform, in 1999. QQ hit the web just as China's online population was starting to explode, and has held on to a huge market share to this day. According to the latest figures released by the company, there are 342 million active QQ accounts, and the service has a 77% share of the local IM market. As a result, QQ is the No.1 IM in China, and the 3rd most popular IM worldwide. What's more, Tencent's web-based entertainment portal, QQ.com, is one of the most visited websites in the world, ranking 17th in Alexa's Global Top 500 websites.

Tencent has evolved into a hugely profitable business; the company's earnings before tax rose to almost RMB1.6 billion in 2007. As a result, Ma Huateng is widely regarded as one of the most successful businessmen in the world, with a net worth of USD1.4 billion according to Forbes; he has also been named as one of "China's 100 Most Influential Economic Figures" by China Economic Weekly magazine. This success has largely been due to Tencent's unique business structure, where a large number of innovative online services including shopping, gaming and more have been built around the company's popular IM. However, Ma keeps pushing the company further to keep ahead of the competition. QQ Labs, Tencent's internet research centre, was founded in 2005. This lab has been developing new web 2.0 services such as QQVideo and QQBookmark, both of which can be accessed with a QQ account. It is innovations like these that have kept Ma Huateng and his company at the head of the pack in the Chinese internet industry.