The founder of Chinese e-commerce company Pinduoduo, operator of the famous Temu platform, Colin Huang, also known as Huang Zheng, is the richest person in China, according to the Bloomberg Millionaires Index.
With a fortune of $48.6 billion (€44.5 billion), Huang overtook bottled water magnate Jing Shanshan, who had held the top spot since April 2021, according to the same source cited by Efe.
Last March, Huang was already named the richest tech entrepreneur in China by Hurun Report, the Chinese version of the American magazine Forbes, thus surpassing Tencent’s Pony Ma and Zhang Yiming of Bytedance, the company he owns for the short-video-sharing social network TikTok.
Huang founded Pinduoduo in 2015, an e-commerce platform known in the Asian giant for its very low-priced products and great promotions.
In 2022, Pinduoduo began its international expansion under the Temu brand, which, according to local press, had sales of $20 billion (EUR 18,310 million at current exchange rates) in the first half of 2024, exceeding last year’s total of about $18 billion (about EUR 16 billion).
Since its launch in September 2022, Temu has quickly expanded its presence to 75 countries and is competing with Chinese rivals such as Shein, TikTok Shop or Alibaba’s international subsidiary AliExpress by making a name for itself by offering products at very low prices.
The topic is currently under close scrutiny by the European Union (EU) and US authorities, who are considering introducing customs duties on these types of Chinese platforms that are sold at low prices.