When China’s two big mobile powers clashed publicly on New Year’s Eve, the stock of a little-known gaming company surged the most ever, minting a new billionaire in 38-year-old maverick entrepreneur Huang Yimeng.
Shares in his indie game distributor XD Inc rose 24% on the first trading day of 2021 after Huawei Technologies Co temporarily removed all Tencent Holdings Ltd games from its app store in a dispute over their revenue split. Investors flocked to the ByteDance Ltd-backed creator of TapTap – a Steam-like download service for games that bypasses the dominant app stores – on the sign of schism between China’s big two.