The man behind the world’s sixth-biggest tech company is no brash, hoodie-encased youth. Instead, Pony Ma, founder, chairman and chief executive of China’s Tencent, prefers suits. “Low profile”, the description almost invariably applied to him, doesn’t begin to capture his allergy to the limelight.
But, as this week’s brouhaha over data privacy demonstrated, it’s tough to stay in the shadows when you sit atop a goliath. Tencent is Facebook, Apple Pay, Spotify, gaming and reading rolled into one, and last year it generated $23bn of revenues and has amassed one of the biggest troves of data on the planet — in China, where government surveillance is axiomatic.
The engine for much of this data is WeChat, Tencent’s killer messaging app that boasts just shy of 1bn monthly active users. Fans — both investors and users, who spend an average of one and a half hours on it every day — adore its ubiquity. Critics are more scathing: dissident Hu Jia has called it “the monitoring weapon in your pocket”.