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NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited, listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under stock code 0777.HK, is a technology company founded on May 1, 1999, and headquartered in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. The company initially built its reputation through online game development, launching its first self-developed title, Monster & Me, in 2002. It listed on the Growth Enterprise Market of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong on November 2, 2007, under stock code 8288, and transferred to the Main Board by way of introduction on June 24, 2008. Over the following decade NetDragon expanded well beyond gaming, creating 17173.com, once regarded as China’s first online gaming portal, which it sold to Sohu at the end of 2003 for approximately twenty million US dollars, and later building 91 Wireless, a smartphone services platform it sold to Baidu in 2013 for 1.9 billion US dollars in what was then the largest internet merger and acquisition transaction in Chinese history. Its flagship game titles include Conquer Online, Eudemons Online, and Heroes Evolved, and by 2021 the company’s total annual revenue had reached approximately 7.036 billion RMB, of which the gaming business contributed roughly 3.6 billion RMB, or about 51.8 percent of the total.
On August 25, 2022, NetDragon announced through its official website and a PR Newswire press release that it had appointed Tang Yu, an AI-powered virtual humanoid robot independently developed by the company, as the Rotating CEO of its flagship subsidiary, Fujian NetDragon Websoft Co., Ltd. The appointment was widely reported as the first instance of a virtual digital person serving as CEO of a Chinese company. Tang Yu’s career within NetDragon had in fact begun years earlier, with an official employment start date of September 6, 2017. She had previously held the title of AI Vice President and had been deeply involved in the company’s AI-plus-management strategy and its metaverse organizational strategic planning. The announcement was effective immediately, and Chinese media outlets including GamerSky, Sina Finance, and Guangming Daily reported the story within hours. It is important to note that the Rotating CEO title applied to the subsidiary, not to the parent company NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited, whose human leadership structure remained unchanged. Dr. Xiong Li continued as CEO of the parent company, and Dr. Dejian Liu remained as chairman.
Tang Yu’s public-facing activities had already attracted attention before the CEO appointment. On April 1, 2020, she appeared in partnership with Tsinghua University for an online virtual recruitment event, introduced as the first AI executive in China and bearing the title of NetDragon AI Vice President. The recruitment was conducted remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic in a format described as aerial recruitment. In April 2021, NetDragon exhibited a physical robot form of Tang Yu at the Fourth Digital China Construction Summit in Fuzhou. In November 2020, Tang Yu participated in the Eighth Chinese Ritual Music Conference held in Hengdian, Zhejiang Province, where she was bestowed the ceremonial title of Shanggong Ritual Music Envoy, a designation drawing on the historical tradition of female officials in the Chinese imperial palace and the Confucian concept of ritual music.
Tang Yu does not operate alone within NetDragon’s AI management ecosystem. The company has deployed additional AI staff members, including Tang Xiaoqing, who serves as an AI assistant, and Tang Sheng, who holds the role of AI project management manager. By the time of the CEO appointment in August 2022, the AI management team led by Tang Yu had processed more than 300,000 person-times of document approvals, issued nearly 500,000 person-times of affair reminders and early warnings, administered 1,288 person-times of internal rewards and punishments, and conducted more than 40,000 person-times of employee knowledge and skills training sessions per year. These figures, drawn from NetDragon’s own disclosures, paint a picture of an AI system embedded across a wide range of administrative and human resources functions rather than one making high-level strategic decisions in isolation.
The appointment generated enormous international media coverage and contributed to a noticeable short-term boost in NetDragon’s stock price. Shares traded in the range of fourteen to sixteen Hong Kong dollars around the time of the announcement in August 2022, rose to approximately sixteen dollars by March 2023, and reached a fifty-two-week high of roughly twenty-three dollars during the broader AI enthusiasm that followed the launch of ChatGPT. Coverage appeared across outlets including Business Insider, The Independent, Slashdot, and The Hustle, most of which framed the appointment as a novel experiment at the intersection of corporate governance and artificial intelligence. The stock’s trajectory since then, however, has followed the headwinds facing the broader Chinese technology sector and NetDragon’s own revenue contraction. By December 2025 shares had fallen to approximately ten Hong Kong dollars, and by April 2026 they were trading in the range of eight to ten dollars, roughly half the 2023 peak. The company’s market capitalization stood at approximately 643 million US dollars as of February 2026.
NetDragon’s financial performance in the years following the appointment reflects a company in transition. Revenue declined from approximately 7.1 billion RMB in 2023 to 6.0 billion RMB in 2024, a drop of 14.8 percent, and fell further to 4.5 billion RMB in 2025, a decline of 26.0 percent. Much of this contraction was driven by challenges in the education subsidiary Mynd.ai and by optimization within the gaming business. Profitability metrics, however, improved on the back of cost-cutting measures tied to the company’s AI-plus strategy, with staff cost savings of approximately 100 million RMB from continuing operations reported in 2024. Dividends actually increased, rising from 0.40 Hong Kong dollars per share in 2023 to 0.50 Hong Kong dollars per share in both 2024 and 2025, and the company announced a 600-million-Hong-Kong-dollar shareholder return program in August 2025. Its MSCI ESG rating was upgraded from BBB to A during this period.
The company’s strategic narrative has also shifted. In the immediate aftermath of the Tang Yu appointment, NetDragon leaned heavily into metaverse and blockchain branding. It had conducted a Neopets NFT sale of 4,233 tokens on the Solana blockchain in 2021, held more than forty million US dollars in cryptocurrency, and in January 2023 completed a four-million-US-dollar financing round for a planned Neopets Metaverse game. In November 2023 it made a twenty-million-US-dollar strategic investment in Rokid Corporation for AR technology with a five-year metaverse partnership. By 2024 and 2025, however, the company had quietly pivoted away from metaverse branding toward language centered on AI-plus and AIGC. Its 2025 annual results, released in March 2026, framed AI-plus-gaming and AI-plus-education as the dual pillars of the business, with continued investment in AI, extended reality, robotics, and blockchain. The game pipeline now emphasizes AI-native titles rather than blockchain-specific projects, a shift that mirrors the broader industry-wide cooling of the NFT and blockchain gaming sectors.
A candid assessment of Tang Yu’s operational role was offered in December 2022 by Yu Le, the head of NetDragon’s digital human program, who acknowledged that Tang Yu still required a long process of data accumulation before she could develop independent learning and decision-making abilities. At that time, ninety percent of leave reviews were managed by the AI team led by Tang Yu. This disclosure suggests that while Tang Yu processes a large volume of routine administrative tasks, autonomous strategic decision-making remains aspirational rather than realized. The media consensus that emerged over the following years characterized the experiment as a successful corporate branding initiative that generated global attention and likely contributed to short-term stock gains, while operationally Tang Yu functions as a sophisticated AI management automation system handling approvals, performance monitoring, and task reminders rather than serving as an autonomous chief executive.
Tang Yu has remained as Rotating CEO of Fujian NetDragon Websoft Co., Ltd. continuously since August 25, 2022. No removal, resignation, or title change has been reported. In April 2024 she was named China’s Best Virtual Employee of the Year at the 2024 China Digital Human Industry Forum in Guangzhou, where NetDragon Vice President Chen Changjie delivered the keynote and Senior Director Jiang Hongyu accepted the award. In November 2024 NetDragon was named Industry Leader of the Year on the 2024 Metaverse Most Promising Investment Value Watchlist. As of March 2025, the company’s milestones page continued to reference Tang Yu in her role as Rotating CEO.
No other major Chinese company has replicated the Tang Yu model by formally appointing a virtual digital person to a C-suite executive position. The virtual digital human industry in China has expanded enormously, with iiMedia estimating the core market at 33.9 billion RMB in 2024, but growth has concentrated in customer-facing roles such as virtual livestreamers, influencers, and customer service agents rather than in corporate governance applications. China’s evolving AI regulatory framework, which includes the deep synthesis regulations that took effect in January 2023, the interim measures for generative AI services that took effect in August 2023, and mandatory AI content labeling rules that took effect in September 2025, focuses primarily on consumer-facing AI services, content generation, and deep synthesis. Draft provisional measures on human-like interactive AI services released by the Cyberspace Administration of China in December 2025 introduced requirements such as user notification of AI interaction and two-hour continuous use break prompts, but no regulation specifically addresses or prohibits virtual human corporate executives. Tang Yu’s role as an internal management tool appears to fall outside most current regulatory frameworks.
The Tang Yu experiment occupies a singular position in the landscape of corporate AI adoption. It has endured for nearly four years without being rescinded or replicated, generating far more value as a branding and communications vehicle than as a governance innovation. NetDragon has leveraged the appointment to position itself as a forward-thinking AI company even as its core business has contracted, and the sustained international media interest suggests the narrative retains currency. Whether the experiment represents a genuine preview of AI-augmented corporate leadership or a durable piece of strategic marketing depends largely on whether Tang Yu eventually acquires the autonomous decision-making capabilities that her own program director acknowledged she lacked. For now, she remains what she has been since 2022: a highly visible symbol of ambition, a capable processor of routine administrative work, and the only virtual CEO in China.
[Apr 2026]