Pinduoduo: Everything You Need to Know About PDD, China’s Third-Biggest Ecommerce Site
The C2M model may change how we all shop.
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Pinduoduo is known as PDD.
Recently, it has appeared with much greater frequency in my news feed in this initialized form: PDD.
At first, I genuinely thought it was a new name for Sean “P Diddy” Combs and left it at that. Just one step from turning himself into a symbol, I assumed.
Then I saw that PDD was indeed that Chinese ecommerce site — the country’s third-biggest, no less — and I had another thought.
‘P Diddy won’t like this’, I thought. P Diddy will not like PDD taking up his air space at all.
So I looked Diddy up and it turns out he was sued in 2011 (unsuccessfully, and you’ll soon see why) for $1 trillion in damages for, among other things, “causing 9/11”. No joke.
I guess he has bigger concerns than minor name infringement by a borderline homophone.
With that important distinction clarified, let’s get down to it.
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Pinduoduo: What do you need to know?
First, just gimme the facts.
- Pinduoduo was founded in 2015 by an ex-Google engineer, Colin Huang.
- Huang wanted to merge the strengths of Alibaba and Tencent in ecommerce and social media, respectively. “Neither of these companies understands how the other makes money”, Huang noted in an interview with Bloomberg.
- PDD is NASDAQ-listed since 2018, when it was one of the biggest IPOs of the year.
- Pinduoduo finished 2019 with 585.2 million active shoppers on its platform, which represented a sharp rise from 418.5 million in 2018.
