Colin Huang’s reign as China’s richest man may have been short-lived. The founder of low-cost retailer Temu took the title in early August and lost it before the end of the month. But that doesn’t mean his empire is over. It’s a sign of a rising billionaire who could climb the Forbes list of the world’s richest people in the coming years.
Although the “Timo” store has been able to achieve huge profits in the global markets, Huang’s rise to the status of the richest man in China was not due to the store alone. Rather, the “Pinduoduo” store, another store owned by Huang and very popular in China, contributed to this success.
But Pinduoduo was the main reason for Huang’s downfall, as the company’s shares fell 25%, causing losses of $14.1 billion, reducing Huang’s value to $35.2 billion and dropping his position among China’s richest people to fourth place and 45th among the world’s richest people. So how did Huang manage to climb this list in a world full of competitors and dominated by “Ali Express” and “Amazon”.
Humble beginnings
Colin Huang was born in 1980 to parents who worked in a factory in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, where Alibaba is headquartered. Despite his humble upbringing among the hundreds of thousands of children of Hangzhou factory workers, his brilliance in mathematics caught the attention of his teachers, so much so that one of the teachers asked him to take the entrance exam for the Hangzhou Foreign Language School.
Hangu was able to achieve what was required of him to enter this prestigious school, and according to a post he published on his account on Medium, his entry into this school was a real reason for the success he has achieved today, as it was one of the schools that adopted Western philosophy, which affected him positively.
Before he turned 20, Huang had access to the Internet among a small group of students in China, which enabled him to make international friends and strengthen his connection to computers and various sciences, which made it easier for him to obtain the Milton Foundation scholarship launched by Bill Milton, founder of VeriFone.
Huang then moved to his first job as an intern at Microsoft in the company’s Beijing office, and later moved to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, where his salary jumped dramatically. Thanks to his constant desire to learn and develop, he set his sights on Google, which was still a startup at the time, and was later able to work there as a member of the software development team before moving to the product management department. This coincided with the company’s attempts to enter the Chinese market, which Huang contributed to.
Huang returned to China in 2006 as part of Google’s efforts to launch in China, and despite the many challenges that faced this process, Huang pointed to the experiences he gained at the company that made his life and launching his own program easier.
A group of companies before achieving success
Huang left Google in 2007 and moved on to work at several other companies, coinciding with the launch of his first online store, Ouku, which is still active today, but under new ownership after he sold it in 2010. He then founded another company called Leqi, a company that aims to help foreign brands penetrate the Chinese sector. Pinduoduo also indicates that he founded the game development company Xinyoudi in 2011, although there is no clear source confirming that a company with that name exists today.
In 2020, The Financial Times took notice of Huang and named him the secretive internet king of Shanghai, due to his expanding business and presence in many online companies across various sectors.
By 2015, Huang founded PDD Holdings, which is the real reason behind today’s success. The company owns several e-commerce platforms, including Teemo and Pinduoduo. During that year, Huang was able to secure an investment of $8 million, followed by $100 million by the end of the following year.
At its heart, Pinduoduo was an online store, albeit with a different operating mechanism. It relied on a game-like shopping experience, offering a series of challenges that provided discounts to shoppers. It succeeded in a short time, so that it was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2018, without Huang attending the session, contrary to what entrepreneurs would expect from this moment. At the same time, Huang invested in Buddhism and began to develop an attachment to it, before stepping down as CEO in 2020, to be replaced by Chen Li, one of the company’s founding members.
Marketing based policy
In September 2022, BD Holdings launched its discount shopping app Temu in the United States, and through a series of successful marketing moves such as a Super Bowl ad, the app was able to climb to the top of the list of downloaded apps in the Android and iPhone stores.
Basically, Timo relies on providing a wide range of discounted products from Chinese stores as well as adding some successful marketing phrases, such as “Shop like a millionaire” or “Hurry before the stock runs out.” Although AliExpress offers the same features, Timo focuses more on the user experience and customizes it better to suit the American or European user.
In record time, the application was able to succeed and raise the parent company’s sales to exceed $34.9 billion in 2023, a 90% jump over the previous year, competing with famous American stores such as Target and Walmart.
Legal challenges
Like its contemporary TikTok, the Chinese app has been stigmatized, with many users filing lawsuits against the company, accusing it of selling user information and stealing data on a massive scale, the same accusations leveled at TikTok.
The app is facing a class action lawsuit in Illinois over data leaks, along with a number of demands from senators to investigate the app following allegations of privacy, child labor, and abuse of US laws.
Currently the fourth richest person in China and the 45th richest person in the world, Colin Huang has shifted his focus to building a platform that provides healthy food and protects natural resources. If he can achieve the same success in this initiative as he did in his previous times, then a new empire is being born.