After several moderately successful ventures in gaming and ecommerce, Colin Huang got sick and retired. At one point, the young entrepreneur stayed home for a year thinking about his next move.
The former Google engineer eventually started Pinduoduo, an ecommerce platform known for selling dirt-cheap products with massive promotions, in 2015. He quickly ascended the ranks of the world's richest people, with his net worth peaking at US$71.5bil (RM318.04bil) in early 2021.
Like many so-called Covid billionaires, his fortune collapsed just as fast as it was made, tumbling 87% in the span of about a year.
Then something surprising happened: Huang's PDD Holdings Inc staged a comeback. Although the scale is not as large as before, the development is stable and the Temu brand is expanding in other regions.
As a result, Huang, now 44, has become China's richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. With a US$48.6bil (RM216.18bil) fortune, he displaces Zhong Shanshan, the country's bottled-water king who has held the top spot since April 2021.
He's also the first tech tycoon to top the wealth rankings in more than three years, after government pressure on private businesses ensnared rivals like Jack Ma's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Along the way, Huang has also drawn protests from suppliers for driving down prices and set a punishing work schedule for his own employees.
"Ma and Jeff Bezos have been corporate leaders in their moments, but the times have changed and Huang is seeing great success with a different, less visible approach," said Brock Silvers, managing director at private equity firm Kaiyuan Capital.
Representatives for PDD didn't respond to requests for comment.
Math prodigy
Unlike Ma, the English teacher-turned-founder of Alibaba, Huang represents a new generation of Chinese tech entrepreneurs who started their careers with global opportunities.
At 12, his prodigious math talent earned him a place at the elite Hangzhou Foreign Languages School, where he was classmates with the children of China's political and social elite. After graduating with a computer science degree from Zhejiang University, he left China in 2002 to pursue a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin.
Two years after graduating, he moved back to help set up Google China. He founded his first company in 2007, then sold it in 2010 to start a new one that helped companies market themselves on websites like Alibaba's Taobao or JD.com. When an ear infection led him to retire in 2013, he hatched the idea for Pinduoduo.
PDD "is not about letting people in Shanghai feel like they are living a Parisian life, but making sure that people in Anhui have kitchen paper and fresh fruits", Huang said in 2018 interview with Caijing magazine. "The goal is not to be cheap, but to make users feel like they got a good deal."
Temu time
Huang Renxun resigned as Pinduoduo's CEO in 2020 and as chairman of the board in 2021, and has largely kept a low profile since then.(He said he was pursuing personal interests researching food and life sciences, according to a shareholder letter.)
It was around that time that PDD – and his net worth – started to tumble.
Temu bolstered the company’s revenue and supported its rebound. It soared to the top of the US App Store after its launch in September 2022. PDD reported revenue of about 248 billion yuan (RM153.92 billion) last year, up 90% from 2022.
"In this economic environment, obviously people are looking for great value for their money, people are looking for low prices," said Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at GlobalData Retail. "So this is a time to shine for value retailers like Temu."
In November, the company surpassed Alibaba for the first time to become China's second-largest internet firm and the two rivals have been neck-and-neck since.
Punishing hours
Still, the breakneck growth has drawn scrutiny at home and abroad. Even after a probe into working conditions following the death of an employee in 2021, PDD continues to demand that employees work from 11am to 11pm, six days a week, plus overtime. It's a variation of the industry's "996" culture which companies like ByteDance Ltd and Alibaba steered away from after Beijing's regulatory scrutiny.
Temu's ultra-cheap offerings also led to growing frustration among some merchants and third-party sellers, who feel the ecommerce giant is increasingly squeezing them for revenue. Things came to a head in a series of public rallies this summer, when, in one case, hundreds of small suppliers yelled slogans outside a Temu office outpost in Guangzhou to protest against what they called unfair penalties the company is levying.
Elsewhere, small businesses in the U.S. have also taken notice of Temu’s rapid growth. The company currently allows duty-free shipments of up to $800 (RM3,558) worth of goods to the U.S., sending small packages from its warehouse in China to individuals in the U.S. Lobbyists are pushing to lower the threshold to $10 (RM44.48).
Still, PDD has engaged in aggressive promotion campaigns, including spending millions on a 30-second Super Bowl advertisement for Temu. It also has catchy banners on its Temu website, including, among others: "Shop Like a Billionaire."
"Temu at the moment is all about growth," Saunders said. "Attract people to the site, get them shopping. Then if they become more addicted, maybe then they start to be more tolerant if we push prices up a little bit. So I think for Temu it's in a land grab era." – Bloomberg
在游戏和电子商务领域取得了几次中等成功后,黄峥生病退休了。有一次,这位年轻的企业家在家呆了一年,思考下一步该怎么做。
这位前谷歌工程师最终于 2015 年创立了拼多多,这是一个以销售超低价产品和大规模促销而闻名的电子商务平台。他迅速跻身世界富豪行列,净资产在 2021 年初达到 715 亿美元(3180.4 亿令吉)的峰值。
和许多所谓的新冠亿万富翁一样,他的财富来得快,去得也快,在大约一年的时间里缩水了 87%。
然后发生了一件令人惊讶的事情:黄峥的拼多多控股公司卷土重来。虽然规模没有以前那么大,但发展稳定,Temu 品牌正在其他地区扩张。
根据彭博亿万富翁指数,现年 44 岁的黄峥已成为中国首富。凭借 486 亿美元(2161.8 亿令吉)的财富,他取代了自 2021 年 4 月以来一直占据榜首的中国瓶装水大王钟睒睒。
在政府对私营企业施压,将马云的阿里巴巴集团控股有限公司等竞争对手卷入其中之后,他也是三年多来第一位登上财富榜榜首的科技大亨。在此过程中,黄光裕还因压低价格和为自己的员工制定繁重的工作时间表而遭到供应商的抗议。
私募股权公司开元资本董事总经理布洛克·西尔弗斯表示:“马云和杰夫·贝佐斯在各自时代都是企业领袖,但时代变了,黄光裕以一种不同且不那么显眼的方式取得了巨大成功。”
PDD 的代表没有回应置评请求。
数学神童
与从英语老师转型为阿里巴巴创始人的马云不同,黄光裕代表了新一代中国科技企业家,他们的职业生涯始于全球机遇。
12 岁时,他凭借超凡的数学天赋考入杭州外国语学校,在那里他与中国政界和社会精英的子女成为同学。从浙江大学计算机科学专业毕业后,他于 2002 年离开中国,前往威斯康星大学攻读硕士学位。
毕业两年后,他回到中国帮助创立谷歌中国。2007 年,他创立了自己的第一家公司,2010 年将其出售,创办了一家新公司,帮助企业在阿里巴巴的淘宝或京东等网站上进行营销。2013 年,由于耳朵感染,他不得不退休,于是他萌生了创办拼多多的想法。
黄仁勋在 2018 年接受《财经》杂志采访时表示,拼多多“不是要让上海人感觉自己过着巴黎生活,而是要确保安徽人有厨房用纸和新鲜水果。我们的目标不是便宜,而是让用户感觉自己物有所值。”
Temu 时代
黄仁勋于 2020 年辞去拼多多首席执行官一职,并于 2021 年辞去董事会主席一职,此后一直保持低调。(据股东信函称,他表示自己正在追求研究食品和生命科学的个人兴趣。)
就在那个时候,拼多多和他的净资产开始下跌。
Temu 增强了公司的收入并支持了其反弹。它在 2022 年 9 月推出后飙升至美国应用商店的榜首。拼多多去年报告的收入约为 2480 亿元人民币(1539.2 亿令吉),比 2022 年增长了 90%。
GlobalData Retail 零售分析师 Neil Saunders 表示:“在这种经济环境下,人们显然在寻找物超所值的产品,人们在寻找低价产品。因此,对于像 Temu 这样的价值零售商来说,这是一个大放异彩的时刻。”
去年 11 月,该公司首次超过阿里巴巴,成为中国第二大互联网公司,此后两家竞争对手一直不相上下。
严苛的工作时间
尽管如此,这种飞速的增长还是引起了国内外的关注。即使在 2021 年一名员工死亡后对工作条件进行了调查,拼多多仍要求员工每周工作六天,从上午 11 点到晚上 11 点,外加加班。这是行业“996”文化的一种变体,在北京的监管审查之后,字节跳动有限公司和阿里巴巴等公司都避开了这种文化。
Temu 的超低价产品也导致一些商家和第三方卖家越来越沮丧,他们觉得这家电子商务巨头正在越来越多地压榨他们以赚取收入。今年夏天,一系列公众集会将事情推向了高潮,有一次,数百名小供应商在广州的 Temu 办公地点外高呼口号,抗议该公司征收的所谓不公平罚款。
在其他地方,美国的小企业也注意到了 Temu 的快速增长。该公司目前允许免税运送价值高达 800 美元(3,558 令吉)的商品到美国。
尽管如此,PDD 还是积极开展促销活动,包括斥资数百万美元为 Temu 制作 30 秒超级碗广告。其 Temu 网站上还有醒目的横幅,其中包括:“像亿万富翁一样购物。”
“Temu 目前专注于增长,”Saunders 说道。“吸引人们访问网站,让他们购物。然后,如果他们变得更加沉迷,也许当我们稍微提高价格时,他们就会开始更加宽容。所以我认为 Temu 正处于抢地盘的时代。”——彭博社