E-commerce tycoon Colin Huang has become China’s richest man, according to an index released Friday, capping the rise of the former Google employee whose shopping site Temu lured consumers with low prices and all-powerful algorithms.
Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings – which owns Temu and Chinese retail app Pinduoduo – is currently worth $48.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He overtakes Zhong Shanshan, the boss of beverage maker Nongfu Spring, who had topped the list since April 2021, and is now the 25th richest person in the world and the richest person in China.
Close behind is Ma Huateng, also known as Pony Ma – head of technology giant Tencent, whose WeChat is often described as China’s “jack of all trades app”.
And in fourth place is Zhang Yiming, founder of Bytedance, which owns the hugely popular video-sharing platform TikTok.
Huang, born in 1980 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, was a teenage math genius and former employee of Google China.
In 2015, he founded the online shopping site Pinduoduo, which became one of China’s most successful e-commerce empires – competing with Jack Ma’s Alibaba.
The app attracted consumers with huge discounts and a huge range of products, offering some astonishingly low prices in an extremely competitive environment.
The overseas version, Temu, was launched in the US in 2022 and was able to build a loyal customer base there with extremely cheap goods manufactured and shipped in China.
Its success coincided with persistently high inflation, which prompted price-conscious consumers to seek out bargains. Since then, the concept has flourished in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere.
Although Temu only launched in Europe last year, the company says it has an average of around 75 million monthly active users in the region.
However, its enormous success led to allegations of unfair business practices and lax safety standards.
This year, consumer groups in Europe accused Temu of manipulating shoppers and tricking them into spending more, thereby undermining their ability to make “free and informed choices.”
And in April, South Korean regulators launched an investigation into Temu on suspicion of misleading advertising and unfair business practices.
Last month, hundreds of traders in China demonstrated in front of an affiliated office in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, complaining that they were being treated unfairly when selling their products on the platform.
However, this did not affect the company’s success: in May, PDD Holdings announced that net profit in the first quarter had more than tripled compared to the previous year.
The company’s U.S.-listed shares closed at $138.02 a share on Thursday, giving it a market capitalization of $191.68 billion.
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