JAMIE CARR: Pinduoduo – from farming to fashion
Astonishing operational scale has rivals nervous
Founded in 2015 in China as an online marketplace to put farmers in touch with consumers, Pinduoduo has grown at extraordinary speed, morphing into a third-party platform model connecting merchants and consumers across multiple categories. The sheer scale of the operation is astonishing. In 2021, despite all the restrictions and complications of the pandemic, the company handled 61-billion orders from more than 11-million suppliers, generating $2.2bn of net income on revenues of $14.7bn.
In the three months to the end of September 2022, Pinduoduo increased sales 65% year on year, eating the lunch of the sector’s whales — Tencent, whose revenues declined, and Alibaba, which grew by a mere 3%. Beijing’s desire to smash the dominance of Alibaba in the e-commerce sector clearly helped, as did the zero Covid policy, which led to many of its 900-million users stuck at home for endless lockdowns with nothing better to do than to keep on shopping on the app...
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