Tencent co-founder Pony Ma returned to the top of the wealth rankings in China, making him the latest tech billionaire to achieve the status.

Weak economic data from the world’s second-biggest economy sent some Hong Kong-listed shares lower on Monday, allowing Ma to surpass bottled water tycoon Zhong Shanshan with a fortune of $US44 billion ($65.2 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Zhong drops to third place, and Zhang Yiming, the founder of privately-held TikTok owner ByteDance, is second.

Ma’s wealth swelled lately as Tencent gains surpassed the performance of any similar-sized rival, riding a resurgence of gaming in China, the world’s biggest mobile arena. The success of blockbuster titles from its DnF Mobile to Black Myth: Wukong — a cultural phenom that it backed — coupled with pledges of support from Beijing, helped propel Tencent to levels not seen since Covid-era internet peaks.

Ma represents “a new generation of Chinese billionaires” whose business is aimed at satisfying customers’ “psychological” rather than physical needs, said Hao Gao, director of the Research Centre for Global Family Business at Tsinghua University.

Ma’s wealth surge came after China spent the better part of two years reining in the country’s most powerful tech firms, including Alibaba Group and Didi Global, along with their ultra-rich founders. That clampdown eroded investor and entrepreneurial confidence and chilled a private sphere that was crucial in propelling the Chinese economic miracle of past decades.

Ma, who once embodied China’s ruling class of exorbitantly wealthy tech moguls, was also caught up in the purge. But unlike his more outspoken colleagues, Tencent’s founder has always been something of a recluse, shunning the spotlight and preferring to orchestrate activity from behind the scenes.

His wealth is still down about 40 per cent from its peak in January 2021, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index. He is the third person to hold the title of China’s richest since July, after record-breaking sell-offs erased billions from the fortunes of the nation’s richest and revealed deepening investor concern over the health of Asia’s biggest economy. Colin Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings, the owner of Temu, held the crown for just 18 days last month before surprising his own investors with a gloomy outlook for his e-commerce firm.

Ma established Tencent in 1998 with money he made from an earlier venture at a cost of 500,000 yuan ($104,460), the equivalent of 62 years of the average Chinese wage at the time. A native of China’s southern Guangdong province, he studied computer science at Shenzhen University and was a software developer before co-founding Tencent with four others.