NetEase Hangzhou Visit: 29 Years of Product Method and Counter-Cyclical Growth

A NetEase headquarters visit puts a business delegation inside a company that has been building consumer internet products since 1997, whose products reach more than 1 billion users in China, and which reported 112.6 billion yuan of net revenue for its 2025 financial year in an unaudited company announcement. The programme runs for a full day at the Hangzhou headquarters on Wangshang Road in Binjiang District: a campus walk, a culture and values session led by internal lecturers, a visit to a public reading library the company co-built, a long session on internet innovation and operations, and a closing workshop that turns the day into an action plan. What a team takes home is a method rather than a product tour.

Key takeaways

The visit is held at NetEase's Hangzhou headquarters on Wangshang Road in Binjiang District, and the standard programme is one day from 09:30 to 17:10. The itinerary is adjustable, and the eight segments set out below are the default shape of the day rather than a fixed script.

NetEase was founded in 1997. Its products reach more than 1 billion users in China, and for its 2025 financial year the company reported net revenue of 112.6 billion yuan in an unaudited announcement covering the fourth quarter and the full year. That figure is the company's own reporting for the year to the end of 2025, not an independently verified number.

The reason to go is the method. The company's own reading of its near-thirty-year record is that craft and innovation are not slogans but mechanisms that can be taken apart, learned and repeated, and the day is arranged to show where those mechanisms actually sit: in the campus and its services, in a project process, in a culture session, and in a library the company runs as a public cultural space.

The day is built as on-site teaching plus hands-on training plus a review workshop, delivered by NetEase's internal lecturers and by executives still in post. The culture session, the afternoon operations session and the action-planning workshop are the three parts delegations most often ask to extend.

We arrange the programme end to end, including site scheduling on the Chinese side, the coach transfer to the reading library and English interpretation on site, so that the sessions can go into specifics rather than staying at the level of a company brochure.

Key visit details

Where the visit is held

Location — NetEase's Hangzhou headquarters at Wangshang Road, Binjiang District, Hangzhou, together with the NetEase Snail Reading Library, which the company co-built with the Binjiang district government and which is reached by a coach transfer from the campus.

Getting there — Binjiang District sits across the river from the older centre of Hangzhou, so the campus is reached by road rather than on foot from a downtown hotel, and the early-afternoon transfer to the library is part of the day. We plan the transport as part of the programme, including pickup from your hotel.

Format and duration

Duration — One day, 09:30 to 17:10, with the itinerary adjustable to the delegation's own objectives. The default day is eight segments: registration and welcome, a campus walk, a culture and values session, lunch in the staff canteen, a transfer and rest period, the reading library and brand exhibition, a session on internet innovation and operations management, and the closing workshop.

Format — On-site teaching combined with hands-on training and a review workshop. Sessions are delivered by NetEase's internal lecturers and by executives who are still in post, and the afternoon ends with a structured action-planning workshop using a canvas rather than with a summary talk.

Who the programme suits

Best suited to — Business delegations and entrepreneurs; product, operations, project and marketing leaders; and teams from outside China studying how a long-established consumer internet company runs product, delivery and culture. The material is written for practitioners, not for sightseeing.

Main themes — Product method and long product cycles; project and requirements management; culture, organisation and internal service design; marketing and growth practice; and how a company keeps re-entering markets it first entered decades ago.

Booking, group size and site rules

Booking — Around 30 days in advance is the practical lead time, because campus access and the speakers' calendars are scheduled internally. The programme is best suited to groups of 10–20 participants; larger delegations are split for the workshop. We charge per group, so larger groups usually offer better value per person. Individuals and smaller groups are welcome to enquire at a higher per-person rate.

Visiting requirements — Visitor names are submitted ahead of the visit so that campus access can be arranged, and photography rules differ by building and are confirmed with the host during planning rather than on the day. Lunch is taken in the staff canteen, which is a working part of the campus rather than a visitor facility.

Why a NetEase visit is worth a delegation's day

The first answer is longevity. NetEase was founded in 1997, has grown its products to more than 1 billion users in China, and reported 112.6 billion yuan of net revenue for its 2025 financial year. Twenty-nine years is long enough to contain several complete cycles of the Chinese internet, and a company that is still building for new audiences at that age is more instructive to study than one that is merely large.

The second answer is that the transferable asset is a habit rather than a hit. The same company has run one game title over a very long horizon, repeatedly re-entered the market with products aimed at younger players, published new titles globally, and built consumer businesses outside gaming. Delegations working on portfolio renewal tend to find the sequencing more useful than any single product.

The third answer is the internal-service logic. On the campus walk, the one-stop administrative windows, the small post office, the gym and the sports field are not decoration: they are the visible part of a management choice about how much of an employee's working life the company is prepared to organise. The reading library makes a version of the same argument outside the company. Both are the kind of arrangement a visiting operations team can argue with productively.

Inside the Hangzhou headquarters

The programme moves through five moments on site, and it is worth deciding in advance which of them your delegation came for. A group that arrives with a specific question takes more away from the same day than one that arrives simply to look.

From a free email service in 1997

The timeline starts with the free email service the company launched in 1997 and runs through the product lines that followed: the long-running operation of Fantasy Westward Journey, the titles that brought younger players in, such as Identity V and Eggy Party, the global launches of Where Winds Meet and Marvel Rivals, and the consumer businesses outside gaming, including NetEase Cloud Music and NetEase Yanxuan. Read as a sequence rather than a list, it is a study in a company widening one product discipline into new categories instead of replacing it.

The campus walk and what the space says

The campus walk follows a set route: the general building, the café, Building 1 — the administration building — the gym, the small post office, the supplies centre, the administrative service windows covering finance, HR and IT, the sports field, the office area and a meeting room. The architecture is deliberately plain, and the interesting material sits in the services rather than in the design: the administrative centre runs as a single service point, and the post office, gym and sports field are inside the working campus rather than beside it. The site carries a nickname in the industry and among its own staff — the pig farm — an internal label that has stuck. For a visiting team it is a reminder that a culture of craft is usually attached to a culture of small, unglamorous services.

The culture and values session

The morning session is delivered by an internal lecturer and works through six modules: company history, corporate culture, product overview, organisational structure, operating model and management rules. NetEase states its corporate value as gathering the power of people, and the session's job is to show how a value of that kind is translated into hiring, project approval and the way requirements are managed. Delegations from outside China usually find the organisational material the most directly comparable, because it describes how decisions are routed rather than what the brand claims to believe.

The Snail Reading Library

The afternoon moves to the NetEase Snail Reading Library, which opened in October 2018 and was built jointly by the Binjiang district government and NetEase. It is a three-storey standalone building in a deep red, covering 1,800 square metres, holding more than 80,000 books, with a nine-metre book wall and a glass spiral staircase, and it receives around 250,000 readers a year. It is the company's only offline cultural space, and it operates as a public-interest library rather than as a brand showroom. For delegations interested in how a platform business approaches a physical, non-commercial product, this stop is often the most surprising hour of the day.

How the course curriculum is assembled

Beyond the standard day, the company keeps a curriculum that teams can combine to their own profile, and it divides into roughly two families of material. The first covers the company itself and how work is delivered: history, business lines and culture; project management, including the shift from project thinking to product thinking; and an innovation method that looks at where a mature business finds its next opportunity. The second covers product and demand: product design and the craft behind specific services, marketing and growth, new-retail thinking, and frontier technology. Each direction can be taken as a run of two sessions, and the combination is chosen once we know what your delegation is trying to fix.

Two clocks inside one company

The clearest way to read NetEase is as two clocks running at once. The first is the long clock: a single title kept alive and developed over many years, with a live-operations discipline that treats a game as an ongoing service rather than a launch. That is a different skill set from building something new, and it is the one behind the company's reputation for patience.

The second is the renewal clock. The company has repeatedly come back to the market with products aimed at audiences it did not previously serve, most visibly the titles that captured younger players and, more recently, games launched globally. Alongside gaming sit the non-game businesses, including NetEase Cloud Music and NetEase Yanxuan, which apply product standards of the same kind to different categories.

The counter-cyclical argument is that the two clocks coexist because the method, rather than the category, is what carries over. Craft and innovation, on the company's own account, are mechanisms that can be taken apart and reused rather than values that live in a slogan. That claim is the one worth testing on the day: ask the speakers where the mechanism is written down, who owns it, and what happens when it is ignored.

What different teams take away

For product teams — how one company sustains a long-lived product and still brings new ones to market, and what its approach to requirements, iteration and product-versus-project thinking looks like in practice.

For operations and project-delivery teams — the path of a project from proposal to delivery, how requirements are managed, and how an internal service layer is designed so that delivery teams spend their time on the product rather than on administration.

For culture, people and internal-service functions — how a company expresses its values through concrete services and rules rather than through internal communications, and what that costs to operate at campus scale.

For marketing and growth teams — how a long-established consumer business approaches campaigns, single-product scale-up, and the shift from traffic-led thinking to retaining and deepening a user base.

For business leaders and strategy teams — the portfolio question: how a company decides when to keep developing an old product, when to re-enter a market for a younger audience, and when to take a product abroad. The same site should produce a different debrief for each of those five groups, and telling us which one your delegation is shapes the whole day.

Sample visit programme

The times above are the programme's default sequence, and the whole itinerary is adjustable: the schedule is set according to the delegation's requirements and confirmed before departure. Where a group wants more time in one session, we rebalance the day rather than add hours to it.

“Gather the power of people.” That is how NetEase states its corporate value, and the company's own summary of its record is close to it: craft and innovation are not slogans but mechanisms that can be decomposed, learned and replicated. The one-day programme is arranged around that claim rather than around the products.

Where a NetEase visit can be arranged

NetEase's headquarters is in Hangzhou, and that is where the programme described above runs, at Wangshang Road in Binjiang District. Hangzhou suits a delegation that wants more than one company in a single short trip, and we normally build the day inside a Hangzhou tech tour so that the city's wider technology and retail scene is part of the route rather than a separate booking.

Most delegations pair it with one or two other stops. A Hangzhou day that also takes in an Alibaba company visit puts two very different product cultures next to each other, and a Hema new-retail store visit adds the physical-retail end of the same industry. Tell us what your team is working on and we will sequence the stops around it.

Practical notes for the day

Build in travel time. The campus is in Binjiang District, across the river from the older centre of Hangzhou, and the reading library is reached by coach. The day already runs from 09:30 to 17:10, so a delegation that also has a flight, or a second city, on the same date should plan around that constraint rather than expect the programme to compress.

Bring the right people. The sessions pay off most when the delegation includes whoever owns product, delivery or operations in your organisation, not only senior management. The workshop at the end of the day asks each participant to compare their own business against what they have seen, and that works better with practitioners in the room.

Send the questions in advance. The culture session and the afternoon operations session are the parts of the day most sensitive to preparation. Two or three concrete questions handed over in advance produce a materially better discussion than a general request for a company introduction.

Plan for interpretation, and respect the site rules. The vocabulary of product method, project governance and internal service design does not survive casual translation, so English interpretation on site is part of how we run the programme. Visitor names go in ahead of the visit and photography rules differ by building; assume nothing until the host confirms it.

What previous delegations asked us to change

Three adjustments come up repeatedly when we review the day with groups that have just finished it. All three are worth deciding before you book rather than after you arrive.

Less campus walk, more time with people. The route through the campus is genuinely informative, but delegations consistently say the hour with an internal lecturer and the afternoon session are where the value sat. Where the timetable allows, we shorten the walk and give the time to questions.

Pitch one session at the delegation's own function. Teams from a specific discipline — delivery, design, growth — ask for one of the two afternoon blocks to be aimed at that discipline rather than at a general management audience. That is possible, and it has to be requested in advance, because it changes who needs to be in the room on the host side.

Finish with the workshop, not with a summary. The action-planning session is the part of the day most often cut for time, and it is also the part delegates say they used afterwards. We now protect the full hour for it and move anything else out of the way.

Questions before a NetEase visit

Where is the visit held? At NetEase's Hangzhou headquarters on Wangshang Road in Binjiang District, with the afternoon block at the NetEase Snail Reading Library, which is reached by coach.

How long is the programme? One day, 09:30 to 17:10, in eight segments, and the itinerary is adjustable if your delegation needs a different balance.

Who delivers the sessions? NetEase's internal lecturers and executives who are still in post, with English interpretation arranged as part of the programme.

Do we go inside the games business itself? The day covers the company's product history and operating model through sessions, a campus walk and a brand exhibition. Which working areas can be entered is confirmed with the host during planning rather than assumed in advance.

What is the Snail Reading Library? A public-interest library that NetEase co-built with the Binjiang district government, opened in October 2018: a three-storey building of 1,800 square metres with more than 80,000 books and around 250,000 reader visits a year.

Is the visit suitable for a non-Chinese delegation? Yes. The programme is arranged for international business groups, and the sessions are shaped around the questions the delegation sends in advance.

Can the curriculum be tailored? Yes. Two families of material are available — the company and how it delivers work, and product and demand — and each direction can be taken as a run of two sessions and combined to your team's profile.

How far in advance should we book? Around 30 days is the practical lead time, because campus access and the speakers' calendars are scheduled internally.

What group size works best? A group of 10–20 participants is usually the best fit; larger delegations are split for the workshop. We charge per group, so larger groups usually offer better value per person. Individuals and smaller groups are welcome to enquire at a higher per-person rate.

What should we bring? Visitor names in advance for campus access, the two or three questions your team actually wants answered, and enough decision-making weight in the room to act on the answers afterwards.

Arranging your NetEase visit

We arrange the visit for you end to end: the introduction to the host, campus access, the coach transfer to the reading library, the choice of sessions and English interpretation on the day. Tell us your dates, your delegation size and what your team is trying to find out, and we will confirm what can be arranged. Start at chinatechvisits.com/company-visits.