In 1993, as managing editor of Electronic Business Asia Magazine, Hugo Shong, founding general partner of IDG Capital Partners, assisted US-based publisher International Data Group’s founder, Patrick McGovern, in establishing the $50m IDG Capital venture fund in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, when the Chinese venture market was largely overlooked by investors.
McGovern, who died in 2014, said in an earlier Global Corporate Venturing profile: ”Everyone laughed at me for backing them [Chinese entrepreneurs] as there was no stockmarket and companies could not issue stock, so they said it was not the right environment.
“But I talked to China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, and he promised stockmarkets by the end of the 1990s and we were encouraged by that and started investing in 1994. These investments included Tencent, where we invested $1.2m and sold it for $200m, Baidu where $2m turned into $700m, Soufun where we invested $1m for 10% that was worth $100m, and Ctrip where $1m became $26m.”
Shong led many of these deals and oversees IDG’s businesses in 15 Asian countries, while IDG also has venture teams in India, the US, Vietnam and Korea.
The company has established a partnership with top-tier Silicon Valley venture firm Accel to back both China-based entrepreneurs and US companies wanting to expand into China. Last year, it started raising a $1bn third China fund, with a first deal in SouFun, after closing a $750m late-stage second fund in 2011.
In December 2012, Shong said: “China has the world’s biggest number of internet users at more than 600 million people and large numbers of mobile phone users and we are now in the mobile internet age, which is creating very exciting opportunities, especially for China. The mobile internet will be the prevailing technology that will drive economic development in the next five to 10 years. The Chinese entrepreneurial community is very sophisticated, not just those that have studied abroad, so we will invest more there than outside China.”
His board seats include dentistry company Glamsmile, Media China Corporation and Mei Ah Entertainment Group, according to news provider Bloomberg.
Before IDG, Shong was an award-winning reporter for China’s Xinhua News Agency. Shong also studied at Hunan University before gaining a master’s degree at Boston University and finishing graduate programs at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in 1987 and the Harvard Business School in 1996. As a young man, Shong spent four years working as an electrician in a factory as, like many Chinese people older than 50, Shong went through Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.
“I made the equivalent of $6 a month,” he told Boston university’s magazine in 2014. “Life was different because of the Cultural Revolution. We did not have the chance for a normal education. That is why we appreciate the opportunity and why we always try to have some kind of dream.”
IDG’s investment activity since the beginning of 2015
