William Ding

Ding Lei
Born	1971-10-01October 1, 1971 (age 55) Fenghua, Ningbo, Zhejiang, China
Nationality	Chinese
Education	University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (Bachelor of Science, communication technology)
Occupation	Businessman
Company	NetEase, Inc.
Title	Founder, director and chief executive officer
Net worth	US$39.2 billion (28 September 2026)
Spouse	Wang Xunfang

Ding Lei (born 1 October 1971), widely known outside China as William Ding or William Lei Ding, is a Chinese businessman who founded the internet company NetEase in Guangzhou in June 1997 and has served as its chief executive officer for most of the period since. The company grew from an email and portal service into one of China's largest video game publishers, and Ding has directed the company through a stock market crisis, a shift into online gaming, a dual listing in Hong Kong and, more unusually for a technology executive, a move into commercial pig farming.

As of 28 September 2026, Forbes estimated Ding's net worth at $39.2 billion, ranking him 56th on its real-time world billionaires list. According to the company's own filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Ding beneficially owned approximately 45.5 per cent of the company's outstanding shares as of 28 February 2026, making him by far its largest shareholder and giving him effective control over most matters put to a shareholder vote. He became the wealthiest individual on the Chinese mainland in 2003, with a fortune then reported at 7.6 billion yuan, and is generally credited as the country's first internet and online gaming billionaire.

Ding trained as a telecommunications engineer before entering the internet industry in the mid-1990s. He built the company from a small email software operation into a diversified group spanning online games, news, music streaming and education, weathered a Nasdaq trading suspension in 2001 triggered by a revenue misreporting scandal, and returned the company to the chief executive's chair in 2005 after four years running its technology as chief architect. Since 2009 he has also built a network of technology-driven pig farms under the company's agricultural arm, Weiyang, a venture that has drawn sustained media attention in China and abroad. He has also given substantial personal donations to higher education, jointly funding the largest single gift then received by a mainland Chinese university and, together with his wife, endowing part of a major research complex at Stanford University.

Early life and education

Ding was born on 1 October 1971 in Fenghua, in the port city of Ningbo, Zhejiang province, which he has continued to describe as his home city in interviews given decades later. As a boy he showed an early interest in electronics: by the age of 13 he had begun tinkering with circuitry, and by 16 he was able to assemble parts into working transistor radios. His self-described childhood heroes were Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, and as a young man he first hoped to become a mechanical engineer.

He studied at the Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering, now known as the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, where he majored in a field variously described in later sources as telecommunications engineering and communication technology. According to his own account, he was not the top student in his class but had "an enquiring mind and broad interests," spending much of his time reading in the university's electronics library of roughly 300,000 volumes rather than working narrowly toward high marks. A tutor who supervised his coursework recalled that he "often raised weird questions" and "didn't work like a normal student." Ding has said the most valuable thing he took from his four years at university was not technical knowledge but "how to study," a habit he said he retained into adulthood, including keeping late hours reading. He graduated in 1993 with a Bachelor of Science degree.

It was during his studies that Ding first encountered the concept of CompuServe, an early data communication service and forerunner of the modern internet, which he later said convinced him the technology had major commercial potential even though it was barely known in China at the time.

Career

State telecommunications bureau to Guangzhou, 1993 to 1997

After graduating, Ding worked for two years as an engineer at a state telecommunications bureau, where he gained practical experience with basic TCP/IP networking technology while continuing to follow developments in the nascent internet industry in the West. He later said he "finally resigned" this position and moved to Guangzhou "in pursuit of personal development," describing the move as "the first step towards creating opportunities that could change the course of my life." He subsequently worked in Guangzhou for a period before striking out on his own, at first running a small software operation with only two other people and spending roughly two years building up his initial capital.

Founding NetEase, 1997 to 2000

In June 1997, Ding registered NetEase (Chinese: 网易) in Guangzhou. The company's early business centred on internet applied software, and in November 1997 it launched a bilingual email system that China.org.cn credited with helping to popularise and accelerate the spread of the internet in China. Within about a year, the company's growing base of free email and personal webpage users had made it one of the country's most visited websites, and by 2004 China.org.cn described the operation as having grown from around a dozen staff to nearly 300 employees.

Ding served as a director of the company from July 1999, and in the company's own account of its governance history he acted as interim chief executive officer from July 1999 until April 2000 before becoming co-chief technology officer. The company completed an initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock market on 30 June 2000, with shares priced at $15.5.

Nasdaq suspension and governance crisis, 2001 to 2002

The company's Nasdaq listing was upended in 2001 after the company disclosed that its reported 2000 revenue may have been misstated. Several senior executives left the company that year, and on 4 September 2001, described in one contemporary account as "possibly the darkest day for NetEase," Nasdaq halted trading in the stock pending an inquiry into the false reporting allegations. Trading did not resume until 2 January 2002, when the shares were remarketed at 95 cents, down from a price that had approached $1 shortly before the halt. Ding moved into the newly created role of chief architect, focused on the company's technology and product direction, in March 2001, and while holding that post he additionally served as the company's acting chief executive officer and acting chief operating officer from June to September 2001, spanning the period in which the crisis broke.

Pivot to online games, 2001 to 2003

Ding has said a research trip to the United States in early 2000 convinced him of the scale and maturity of the American video game market, and he concluded that the company should become China's first large-scale online games company rather than continue to rely, as rival portals Sohu and Sina did, primarily on advertising revenue. Acting on this view, the company acquired the game developer Tianxia Technology in March 2001 and released the game that would become known as Fantasy Westward Journey Online at the end of that year. The wager paid off during the depths of the accounting crisis: the company recorded its first quarterly profit as a Chinese portal site in the second quarter of 2002, and by the third quarter of 2003 games and wireless services had displaced advertising as the company's main sources of income, together accounting for more than 80 per cent of a quarterly gross income of $17.7 million, with online games revenue up 366.8 per cent year on year. The company's Nasdaq shares, worth as little as 95 cents in January 2002, reached $70 by 14 October 2003.

Return as chief executive officer, 2005 to present

Ding resumed the position of chief executive officer of the NetEase group in November 2005, a role he continues to hold as of the company's most recent annual report, filed with the SEC on 15 April 2026, which lists him as the company's sole executive director and chief executive officer at age 54. In June 2020, the company carried out a secondary listing of its shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, in addition to its existing Nasdaq listing, a structure the company has maintained under the exemptions available to secondary-listed issuers.

Leadership and management style

Ding has described leadership at the company in terms of personal obligation rather than ownership, telling an interviewer in 2004: "It is a responsibility. A responsibility for investors, clients, users, employees, and the Internet." He drew a distinction between profitable individual ventures and durable businesses, saying "there are enterprises that don't make money, but there are no businesses that don't make money," and framed his ambitions in terms of talent rather than wealth alone: "Wealth means two things to me, money and talent. What I've got today belongs to yesterday, but what's in my mind creates the future."

That emphasis on talent extended to recruitment. In the mid-2000s Ding personally recruited staff from his alma mater and from other Chinese universities, including Xi'an Jiaotong University, with a stated goal of hiring 2,000 to 3,000 additional employees to build out the company's capabilities. His strategic instincts have also shown a willingness to commit the company to unproven bets: the 2001 decision to buy a game studio and build an online games business while the company was simultaneously fighting a Nasdaq trading halt, and the 2009 decision to move a technology company into industrial pig farming, both represented significant departures from the company's core internet business at the time they were made. The pig farming venture in particular was run with the same data-driven instincts Ding applied to software: the farms used tracking sensors, artificial intelligence and constant Wi-Fi connectivity, and the company allowed members of the public to monitor individual animals online.

Major deals and strategic decisions

The company's Nasdaq initial public offering on 30 June 2000, priced at $15.5 a share, gave the company the capital base for its subsequent expansion, though the stock's early performance was hurt by Western investors' broader wariness of Chinese technology listings at the time. The March 2001 acquisition of Tianxia Technology, which supplied the game that became Fantasy Westward Journey Online, was the strategic move that shifted the company's business model away from advertising and toward online games and value-added services, a mix that by the third quarter of 2003 supplied roughly 80 per cent of the company's revenue.

In 2009, Ding announced his intention to modernise pig farming in China through the company's agricultural affiliate, Weiyang. Weiyang registered in 2011 and opened its first farm in Anji county, Huzhou, Zhejiang province, in 2012, on a site covering more than 485 hectares that also included a bamboo forest and tea garden. A second, larger farm followed in Gao'an, Jiangxi province, announced in October 2017; at roughly 220 hectares, it was some three times the size of the Anji site and was designed to be China's largest single-site black pig farm, with planned output of 150,000 pigs in its first year of production. Weiyang raised a Series A financing round of 160 million yuan (about $22.9 million) in 2017, led by the lifestyle platform Meituan Dianping and the venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, with the e-commerce group JD.com also taking a strategic stake. In November 2019, amid a sharp rise in Chinese pork prices caused by African swine fever, Ding announced plans for a fourth Weiyang farm, to be built in his home city of Fenghua with a planned annual output of 100,000 pigs.

Financial and market performance

The company's total net revenues rose from RMB103.5 billion in 2023 to RMB105.3 billion in 2024 and RMB112.6 billion (US$16.1 billion) in 2025, an increase of 7.0 per cent in the most recent year, driven mainly by games and related value-added services, which grew 10.2 per cent to RMB92.1 billion and accounted for 81.9 per cent of total revenue in 2025. Net income attributable to the company's shareholders rose from RMB29.4 billion in 2023 to RMB29.7 billion in 2024 and RMB33.8 billion (US$4.8 billion) in 2025, with diluted earnings per ordinary share of RMB9.05, RMB9.19 and RMB10.48 in those three years respectively.

Headcount fell over the same period even as revenue grew: the company reported 29,128 full-time employees at the end of 2023, 26,028 at the end of 2024, and 25,382 at the end of 2025. The company returned significant cash to shareholders through both dividends and share buybacks, including dividends of RMB8.0 billion in 2023, RMB11.2 billion in 2024 and RMB13.8 billion (US$2.0 billion) in 2025, alongside additional spending on repurchasing its American depositary shares and related securities. On Nasdaq, the company's American depositary shares (ticker NTES) closed at $115.41 on 25 September 2026, within a 52-week trading range of $106.06 to $156.44.

Ding's personal fortune has tracked the company's rise over more than two decades. He was reported to be worth 7.6 billion yuan, then equivalent to roughly $1 billion, when he became China's richest individual in 2003. By October 2012, as the company moved into pig farming, his fortune was reported at nearly $3 billion. The Hurun Report's Global Rich List for 2017 placed him 47th in the world, with an estimated net worth of $18 billion at age 46. By 28 September 2026, Forbes put his net worth at $39.2 billion, ranking him 56th among the world's billionaires.

Controversies

The company's 2001 accounting and disclosure crisis is the most significant governance controversy of Ding's career. After the company disclosed that its reported 2000 revenue may have been misstated, several senior executives departed, and Nasdaq suspended trading in the company's shares on 4 September 2001 pending an inquiry. The suspension came while Ding was serving as the company's acting chief executive officer and acting chief operating officer. Trading did not resume until 2 January 2002, when the stock was remarketed at 95 cents a share, a fraction of its earlier value.

In October 2020, the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the company to undergo a period of "rectification" and to suspend certain comment and follow functions on its NetEase News application, after government censors found what they characterised as repeated dissemination of inappropriate user comments on the platform. The episode was reported at the time as part of a broader Chinese regulatory campaign, under a rule that took effect in March 2020, holding internet platforms directly responsible for user-generated content that escaped moderation.

Personal life

Ding is married to Wang Xunfang, who is also known outside China as Sophy Ding; Stanford University has described the couple as "longtime university donors" who, beyond their support for Stanford, "also support disaster relief and educational equity in China and elsewhere in Asia." As of 2026, Forbes listed Ding's residence as Hangzhou, in his native Zhejiang province.

In June 2020, Ding purchased a 16,000-square-foot mansion at 10911 Chalon Road in the Bel Air neighbourhood of Los Angeles for $29 million from the Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The price was reported to be 40 per cent above the $17 million Musk had paid for the property in 2012, and came only about a month after Musk had announced on social media that he intended to "own no house" and sell off his real estate holdings.

Philanthropy

In September 2006, Ding and fellow Zhejiang University alumnus Duan Yongping jointly donated $40 million to Zhejiang University to support its educational development, then described as the largest single endowment received by a mainland Chinese university. Of the total, Ding personally contributed $10 million, with the remaining $30 million coming from Duan.

In November 2019, Stanford University opened a $256 million, four-story, 235,000-square-foot research complex housing the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford ChEM-H. Ding and his wife, Wang Xunfang, provided a foundational gift for the ChEM-H building as part of that project, a contribution the university highlighted alongside gifts from anonymous donors supporting the adjoining neurosciences building.

See also

• NetEase
• NetEase Cloud Music
• Pony Ma
• Robin Li
• Jack Ma
• Elon Musk

External links

• William Ding profile at Forbes
• NetEase, Inc. SEC filings on EDGAR