Meet the US-trained coder who is helping NetEase find new life beyond games

For decades, NetEase has been the perennial runner-up to the likes of Tencent Holdings in China’s evolving internet landscape. Now it is betting on a bookish computer scientist to catapult it to the top of the class in the nation’s US$36 billion online education market.

Zhou Feng, chief executive officer of NetEase Youdao, is charged with helping NetEase escape from under Tencent’s enormous shadow and find life beyond video games. The US-trained software coder hand-picked by billionaire founder William Ding Lei is creating an all-in-one learning platform to tap the lucrative space where education and technology overlap. To bankroll that expansion, the company could float Youdao, last valued at US$1.1 billion, as soon as this year.

Zhou is counting on a decades-old custom. Every summer, millions of Chinese high school students sit through a gruelling two-day college entrance exam, or gaokao, that helps determine the course of their lives. That is why China’s tiger moms and dads have long sent their kids from as early as kindergarten age to private tutoring classes for English, math and sciences.

Intense competition has fuelled an education boom, particularly targeting the K-12 group that includes students from kindergarten through high school, creating a coterie of multibillion-dollar corporations. Leading players like New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. and TAL Education Group that still rely mainly on in-class teaching have gone public in the US and seen their shares soar. Online start-ups such as the Tencent-backed VIPKid are still trying to convince parents that digital instruction can be as good, if not better than bricks-and-mortar classrooms.

Through combining content with the latest technology, Zhou sees a business chance for Youdao, whose name loosely translates to “there’s a way”. Courses can be taught through high-speed live-streaming, enabling smooth communication between teacher and student. Artificial intelligence-powered “tutors” can grade homework and use data to evaluate student test results, he said.

“That is what we have always been good at,” said Zhou, 40, a University of California at Berkeley alumnus with a penchant for blending English words into conversations. “Almost every industry in China has been transformed by the internet, but that is not yet the case for education.”