Group buying as a growth engine
Colin Huang's fortune is tied to PDD Holdings, the company behind Pinduoduo, the Chinese shopping platform he launched in 2015. Pinduoduo was built around a simple idea: let shoppers team up with friends and family to buy products at lower prices, and spread those deals through the messaging app WeChat. The approach combined online shopping with social sharing and allowed the platform to grow quickly among price conscious consumers in smaller Chinese cities, a group that the larger incumbents had not fully served.
Pinduoduo worked closely with farmers and small manufacturers, selling agricultural produce and low cost everyday goods directly to consumers. Its growth was unusually fast. Within three years of launch it had hundreds of millions of users, and in July 2018 it listed on the Nasdaq exchange in New York.
Huang held a large stake at the time of the listing, and the shares he retained are the main source of his wealth. As Pinduoduo's revenue and profits grew and the company expanded internationally, the value of those shares rose, making him one of the most prominent figures in Chinese technology.
PDD Holdings, Pinduoduo and Temu
The parent company, renamed PDD Holdings in 2023, now runs two main platforms:
- Pinduoduo, its original marketplace in China, which has grown into one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the country, with a strong agricultural segment
- Temu, an international shopping app launched in the United States in 2022 that sells low priced goods shipped from Chinese manufacturers, and which has since expanded to many other countries
Temu's rapid growth, supported by heavy advertising, made it one of the most downloaded shopping apps in several markets. It has also drawn scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers in the United States and Europe over product safety, data handling and trade rules on small parcels.
PDD moved its registered headquarters to Dublin, Ireland, in 2023. Its management is led by co-chief executives Chen Lei and Zhao Jiazhen. Huang has no executive role and keeps his shares, which carried extra voting rights before he gave them up, through holding entities. Several early investors, including Tencent, also hold stakes.
From Hangzhou to Google and back
Huang Zheng, known in English as Colin Huang, was born in 1980 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. He was admitted to an elite program at Hangzhou Foreign Language School and studied computer science at Zhejiang University. He then earned a master's degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin in the United States.
After graduating he joined Google as a software engineer in 2004 and worked on search and advertising, and he was part of the team that helped set up Google's operations in China. He left in 2007 to start his own companies.
His first venture was Ouku, an online store for consumer electronics, which he sold in 2010. He then founded Leqi, a company that ran online stores for brands, and a game studio. Profits and lessons from these ventures went into Pinduoduo, which was incubated alongside a game company and an online fruit seller he had started earlier. Huang served as chief executive until 2020 and as chairman until 2021.
Stepping back and giving
In 2020 Huang handed the chief executive role to Chen Lei, the company's chief technology officer, and in March 2021 he stepped down as chairman, saying he wanted to focus on research in food science and life sciences. At the same time he gave up the special voting rights attached to his shares, reducing his control over the company.
He has made large charitable commitments. In 2020 he donated money to Zhejiang University, his alma mater, to support research in biomedicine. In 2021 he created the Starry Night Science Fund, endowed with Pinduoduo shares, to support basic research in life sciences and agriculture. Pinduoduo also pledged funds to support rural development and agricultural technology.
Huang has written occasional public letters to shareholders and posts on personal blogs, often discussing his views on business and life, but he has largely withdrawn from public view since stepping back. He has been reported to spend time abroad, though PDD's operations remain largely based in Shanghai.