Temu is owned by Pinduoduo, one of the largest online shopping sites in China. Jakub porzycki/nurphoto through Getty images
During this year’s Super Bowl, a relatively unknown online retailer named Temu made an impression on the US audience after spending $ 21 million on three advertisements on Sunday night. Temu made his super bowled debut last year, with the slogan, “one billionaire shop”. This year, its advertisements followed the same topic and dressed $ 0.99 kitchen supply and $ 9.99 evening dresses among other incredibly low -priced goods available on the site.
Temu launched in the US in September 2022 and according to the market researcher censor tower, attracted 50 million monthly users by January this year. Now, it is about 17 percent of the US discount store market stock, which competes with traditional retailers such as dollar trees and five -Amazon. Temu Pinduoduo has a foreign hand, which is a Nasdaq-listed Chinese e-commerce legend with more than 750 million monthly users. PDD has a market cap of about 174.6 billion dollars, making it the eighth largest company in China and the second largest online retailer behind Alibaba (Baba).
The man behind the success of Pinduoduo is Colin Huang, who founded the company in 2015 and served as CEO and Chairman of the Board by March 2021. Huang was born to factory workers in Hangzo, a city in Eastern China. He attended the University of Jhejiang, a top school in China, and earned a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 2004. The same year, he was hired by Google as an engineer.
In 2006, Huang returned to China to join Google’s China unit led by Huang Kai-Fu Lee. Huang found an e-commerce site called Oko, which he found an e-commerce site called Oko, which he sold in $ 2.2 million in 2010. Pinduodu is the fourth startup of Huang and the most successful one. Within a few years, he was recognized as one of China’s wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs. In 2021, Forbes placed it at number 6 on the “rich list of mainland China”, with a total assets of about 30 billion dollars. When he resigned from PDD that year, Huang said that he was going to pursue “new, long -term opportunities”.
Huang had two Kofounders in PDD. One of them is Lei Chain, who is a three-year-old Junior of Huang and currently serve as the President and Co-CEO of PDD. Chen was the first Technology Officer of Xinyoud Studio, an online gaming company also founded in 2011 by Huang. Chen attended the reputed Singhua University in China and received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, where he was probably met Huang.
The third founder and current co-CEO of PDD is Ziazen Zhao. He first served as the senior vice -president of the company from 2018 to 2023, leading the grocery and agribusiness of the shopping site. Zhao holds a degree in e-commerce management from South China Technology University.
It is not clear who leads PDD’s US -based Temu operations. Temu did not immediately respond to Observer’s request for comments. The company’s linkedIn page also does not list any C-suit officers.
Temu’s rapid growth in the US, viral Chinese short-form video platform Douyin’s foreign version takes into account the story of Tikokkok. (Both companies are owned by China-based loadens.) As Temu receives infamous in the US, regulators have done a growing investigation on the company. Last June, the US Congress examined another popular Chinese online shopping site, Temu and Shin on the alleged use of labor forcibly in its supply chains. “Temu is not doing anything to keep his supply chains free from slave labor. At the same time, Temu and Sheen are constructing empires around our import rules around de minimis loopol – they are investigating millions of goods that are prepared and on millions of goods selling millions of goods,” Mike Galagher, Chairman of the House Selection Committee said in a statement.
Galagher was referring to the allegation that Temu and Shin are taking advantage of a trade flaws that allow foreign goods to enter the valuable US duty-free under $ 800. Investigations found that Temu and Shin took 30 percent of all imported goods using this tax exemption in 2022. In contrast, the gap and H&M, whose products are mainly manufactured abroad, are paid $ 700 million and $ 205 million in import duties, respectively.