NO.7 - MA HUATENG (TENCENT)

Age: 46

Years at current company: 20

Nationality: Chinese

Industry: Internet services

Turnover: $38bn

Rate of growth: 442% over the last 5 years

Ma Huateng has taken full advantage of the Great Firewall of China and a colossal local market to create an internet giant. His company, Tencent, is the proud owner of the WeChat messaging app, which has a billion users worldwide. This engineer by training has bolted on a mobile payment option to the service. The app, WePay is used by 600 million Chinese each month. Mobile games, cloud storage services, video on demand and, of course, advertising revenue are the pillars on which Tencent’s success has been built.   

Notable success: At the end of 2017 Tencent, which is valued at 523 billion dollars, became one of the world’s top five companies.