[image:colinhuang/facebook]

Colin Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings, the owner of discount online shopping platform Temu, has just been named China’s richest man with a net worth of $48.6 billion (R870 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Huang, a serial entrepreneur, founded several other companies in the past, including the online gaming firm Xinyoudi, the agriculture platform Pinduoduo, and the e-commerce site Oku.

The 44-year-old once worked as an engineer at Google China and represents a new breed of Chinese billionaires who have mostly built their riches in the technology sector and don’t mind taking chances by launching several websites.

All that chance-taking seems to have paid off as being named the richest person among China’s 406 billionaires is something else entirely.

Most of his fortune today comes from Temu, whose direct-from-factory business relies mostly on individual Chinese vendors delivering directly to customers worldwide. The business invests massive amounts of money in social media marketing.

Temu has run into a few tax-related snags in South Africa, but Neil Saunders, retail analyst at GlobalData Retail, believes that the online shopping site came at the right time and is perfectly suited to consumers wanting “value for money in the current economic climate”. In other words, cheap stuff that looks expensive.

“Temu at the moment is all about growth. Attract people to the site, get them shopping. Then if they become more addicted, maybe then they start to be more tolerant if we push prices up a little bit. So I think for Temu, it’s in a land grab era.”

In China though, Temu is facing some trouble with their suppliers, specifically over ‘disproportionately high’ fines for things like poor customer service and late deliveries. In Guangzhou, suppliers have been protesting against fines for wrong product descriptions or late deliveries, which in some cases have been five times higher than the retail price of the product.

While SARS is taking a closer look at Temu, the EU is also reportedly in the process of implementing import taxes on packages from Chinese online discount retailers such as Shein, AliExpress and Temu, which they did not have to pay before.

All this seems to suggest that Colin Huang’s rise to the top of the billionaire list in China might be short-lived – much like the lifespan of most products being sold on Temu. Call it fast fortune if you will.

[source:euronews]