China's change merchants: A new breed of CEO emerging in China is wiring the nation—and portending change for just about everything else - Technology

Chief Executive, The, March, 2002 by David Sheff

AsiaInfo went on to become China's premier systems integration company, winning numerous contracts with national and provincial telecommunications companies, and in the process creating as much as 70 percent of the nation's Internet infrastructure. When Tian left to found CNC, Ding finally agreed to take over-with the cautious approval of the board. There was concern that Ding lacked his partner's charisma but, as an AsiaInfo manager says,

When he went out on the historic AsiaInfo road show -- it was the first time a private Chinese company went public in the West -- investors seemed eager to participate in the deal despite the risks of investing in China. The initial offering price was $24 a share. Before the day was over, the stock hit $100 and settled to a first-day close of $48 a share. The deal valued AsiaInfo at more than $4 billion. It was the first private Chinese company to reach $1 billion, never mind $4 billion in value. In spite of the decline in the value of tech stocks since then, AsiaInfo has held up well as the company has continued to announce profitable quarters and large contracts.

"We were shocked at the transformation. His dynamism had been hidden, directed like a laser at his technical team. When he broadened the output to the whole company, we felt supercharged." Ding spent several months in the executive training program at UC Berkeley and, when he returned to China, applied his software genius and obsession with making things work to AsiaInfo itself.

Failures amid success

The Internet industry in China is too new and precarious not to have some disasters, however. A friend of Ding and Tian, Wang Zhidong, was a legend in Zhongguancun. "He and his partner were known to be the smartest of the software geniuses," says leading China venture capitalist Bo Feng, 32, one of Wang's first investors. In 1989 and fresh out of Beijing University Wang was recruited by the university's Computer Science Center, where he went to work at the Beijing Founders Group, a commercial spin-off company that made computers and software. He went on to found what became the nation's largest homegrown software company, SRS, which created a program that translated standard English Microsoft Windows into Chinese, allowing it to read and display Chinese characters. At the time there was speculation that Wang would become the Bill Gates of China.

In the mid- l990s, Wang, now 35, made a controversial decision: to transform SRS into an Internet portal company using Yahoo! as a model. The plan had a twist: The site would unite the world's Chinese by allowing them a digital platform on which they could freely communicate and share information, including business, political and cultural news about China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other communities of Chinese around the world. Given the virtual Great Wall that has surrounded mainland China, blocking all but government-approved information and communication to and from China's billion-plus people, the portal, Sina.com, seemed a miracle.