E-commerce: Mr Huang ZHENG, founder of Pinduoduo, the parent company of Temu, embodies a new generation of Chinese ‘serial entrepreneurs’.”

E-commerce: Mr Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, Temu’s parent company, embodies a new generation of Chinese “serial entrepreneurs”
“Jack Ma has found his clone, and that is not good news for Alibaba.”
The meteoric rise of the young rival Pinduoduo (PDD), led by the discreet Huang Zheng, prompted the founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant to break his silence in November.
“I must congratulate PDD on their decisions and efforts,” Ma wrote graciously, as the market capitalization of the group that owns Temu was closing in on that of the Alibaba empire.
One month later, the challenger PDD even temporarily overtook the group founded by China’s best-known entrepreneur, reaching a valuation of $195 billion.
The rivals are now neck and neck on Wall Street, while PDD is steadily gaining market share in China at the expense of market leader Alibaba and its runner-up, JD.com.
It has been a spectacular rise for a group founded only in 2015 in Shanghai by the son of a factory worker who previously worked at Google. He embodies a new generation of Chinese “serial entrepreneurs” for whom the world’s largest online market is no longer enough, and who confidently set out to conquer global markets.
At 43, Huang Zheng, also known as Colin, resembles a younger twin of the self-made Jack Ma. Like Ma, he comes from Hangzhou, in the heart of the entrepreneurial eastern province of Zhejiang.
He represents an upgraded version for the era of online video and gaming, making the entrepreneur who rode the first Internet wave driven by Yahoo at the turn of the century seem almost old-fashioned.
It is almost as though the baton is being passed from the era of China’s economic take-off and seemingly limitless growth, accelerated by the rise of the Internet, to the age of smartphones and social media in a China that is tightening its belt amid slowing economic growth.
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Pinduoduo’s success is based on a clever combination of low prices and entertainment designed to appeal to younger generations who grew up in the smartphone era, are addicted to screens and video games, but face gloomy economic prospects.
Like Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese sister app), another rising star in e-commerce, PDD “has perfectly understood the expectations of these young people, their need for entertainment, their addiction to constant stimulation in this gloomy economic environment. And the products are cheap!” explains Sandrine Zerbib, co-author of Dragon Tactics: The Tactics of Chinese Entrepreneurs for Better Leadership in Uncertain Times (Dunod, 2022).
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Sébastien Falletti — Le Figaro