There is no better trader than the Chinese, and no better Chinese trader than the Zhejiang trader. This eastern coastal province, south of Shanghai, took some of the best measures during the heady opening period when China went through trial and error and adopted what worked, whether legal, illegal or even illegal. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the last three Chinese to top the national wealth list were born in their capital, Hangzhou, the genteel city famous for its West Lake, where many couples choose to spend their honeymoon.
Colin Huang, founder of online retail platform Temu, has become the richest Chinese person today, surpassing bottled water tycoon Zhong Shanshan and Alibaba founder Jack Ma. At 44, he is worth $46.9 billion, according to Forbes. Huang resigned four years ago from PDD Holdings, formerly known as Pinduoduo, but continues to feed his fortune from its dividends. The expansion of its international subsidiary Temu is adding to its wealth. Temu’s market value surpassed that of Alibaba in May, ending its long dominance of global digital commerce.
It took Huang just nine years to break through. Pinduoduo, founded in 2015, has attracted attention in a competitive domestic market with deep discounts and an out-of-the-way storefront. His goal, he explained in an interview with local magazine Caijing, was not “for Shanghai people to feel like they live in Paris, but for people in Anhui, a rural province, to have kitchen paper and fresh fruit.” The goal is now more ambitious: “Shop like a billionaire,” its website proclaims. A massive investment in advertising, with Superbowl TV campaigns, separates it from Alibaba, as do its customers. Two-thirds of its users are Chinese, while Temu has established itself firmly in the West. It has overtaken Shein in the US and has 75 million monthly customers in Europe.
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His resume highlights a dogged entrepreneur with many successes and failures, a clinical eye for the market and a willingness to reinvent himself. A child prodigy in mathematics, he attended an elite political and economic school in Hangzhou, majored in computer science and earned a master’s degree in the United States. In 2004, he returned to China and joined Google, but the company’s exit from the country left him without a job shortly after. After a year of thinking about his new direction and a few failed initiatives, he founded Pinduoduo.
His fortune had already surpassed $70 billion in 2021, benefiting from the official push for technology, when Beijing ordered it to stop. The government believes the sector is overworked and that wealth should be distributed in a more supportive way. It’s a policy viewed with suspicion in the West, but one that has succeeded in narrowing social disparities. Huang lost 87% of his shares and headed abroad, opening branches in Dublin and Boston and targeting Shen and Alibaba. It has suffered similar allegations to its competitors over unfair business practices and improved security. South Korea is investigating it for false advertising. N
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