Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
NetEase makes money from video games, music streaming, online education, and other internet services in China.
NetEase is one of China's biggest internet companies, and its main business is making and publishing video games. Its most famous titles are self-developed games like Fantasy Westward Journey and Identity V, which are free to download but earn money when players buy virtual items. It also publishes games for other companies in China, including Blizzard titles like World of Warcraft, though that partnership has had a rocky history. Blizzard and NetEase split in early 2023 after failing to agree on terms, then patched things up and relaunched the games in China in 2024. That matters because Blizzard's games bring in players and revenue without NetEase having to build them from scratch.
Beyond games, NetEase runs NetEase Cloud Music, a streaming service that competes with Tencent's music apps. It also runs Youdao, an education technology company that sells online courses and smart devices like e-dictionaries and translation gadgets. Youdao is publicly listed separately, and NetEase still owns most of it. Games are the engine of the company; the other segments are smaller and more uneven. The company is famous for its founder, William Ding, who built NetEase out of China's early dot-com scene in the late 1990s and took it public on NASDAQ in 2000. NetEase has a reputation for engineering talent and for doing its own game development rather than just licensing foreign titles. That has made it a serious player outside China too, with games like Eggy Party drawing attention globally and partnerships with overseas studios.
Ding Lei first got on the internet in 1994 while working at China Telecom. That taste of the online world was enough: he quit his job and started NetEase in 1997 with fewer than twenty people. The company began as an online content portal and ran a bilingual email service. Its domain, 163.com, came straight from the number people dialed to get online in the early days of the Chinese internet — the site was named after the front door to the web.
NetEase went public on Nasdaq in 2000, hoping to ride the tech boom. Instead, it walked straight into the crash. Western investors were already wary of Chinese tech companies, and the stock fell on its first day — a debut so rough people called it a bloody listing.
It turned out the company had overstated its 2000 revenue — the real figure was about half of what was reported. Nasdaq suspended trading of the shares, and NetEase faced being kicked off the exchange entirely. Ding Lei wanted to sell the company, but he could not find a buyer.
With the company near collapse, Ding Lei made a bet that changed everything: NetEase would make video games. It released Fantasy Westward Journey, an online role-playing game, and Chinese players loved it. The game grew into one of the country's most popular titles, with sequels and mobile versions following. Gaming went from a desperate gamble to the heart of the business.
After CEO Ted Sun passed away in 2005, Ding Lei stepped in as chief executive right away. He had always been the company's strategic visionary and the driving force behind its online games, so the move put the founder fully in charge of the business he had built.
NetEase changed its English name from NetEase.com, Inc. to simply NetEase, Inc. after shareholders approved it at a special meeting. A small change, but by then the company was much more than a single website.
NetEase sold its import e-commerce platform, Kaola, to Alibaba for about two billion dollars. The company said the deal would let it focus on its growth strategy and invest where it had a real edge. As part of the same relationship, Alibaba and Yunfeng put more money into NetEase Cloud Music.
NetEase completed a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2020, and the shares rose on the first day, valuing the company in the hundreds of billions of Hong Kong dollars. It was the second US-listed Chinese company to come back to Hong Kong, following Alibaba.
After a fourteen-year partnership, Blizzard Activision ended its licensing deal with NetEase, and games like World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Hearthstone shut down in China in early 2023. The teams that had run those games for years suddenly had nothing to run. Then, in 2024, the two sides reached a new agreement — and agreed that NetEase's own titles would also appear on Xbox.
NetEase began pulling back from its overseas bets, cutting funding to more than a dozen studios and shutting many of them down. The goal was a smaller, tighter portfolio to take on Tencent and MiHoYo's Genshin Impact. The same year, its bet on a licensed game paid off in a big way: Marvel Rivals, made with Marvel Games, reached ten million registered users in three days, and forty million players by early 2025.
NetEase kept shrinking its overseas studio bets: it confirmed that Nagoshi Studio would stop getting funding in 2026, and it sold full ownership of Mattel163 to Mattel for about $159 million. The company now leans on its flagship franchises and its own global hits, rather than a sprawling collection of acquired studios.
Lately NetEase has leaned hard into international expansion, opening studios and hiring developers in places like Japan and the United States to make games for Western players. It also invests heavily in research and development, which keeps its pipeline of new titles moving. The stock trades on NASDAQ and the company pays a regular dividend, returning cash to shareholders while it bets on new games and markets.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026