After building an empire of cheap goods, the billionaire founder behind Pinduoduo and Temu is China’s richest person

At 18, Huang started studying computer science at the prestigious Zhejiang University. In his freshman year, he was selected as a fellow at the Melton Foundation, established by VeriFone founder Bill Melton. 

The foundation selected young students from emerging regions around the globe. Each fellow was given a computer and internet data so they could browse the web and message other fellows. They could also travel to a member country each year. Huang credits this experience for giving him a more international mindset than most people in China.  

Huang received his first salary as a Microsoft intern and worked at Microsoft Beijing and the company’s Redmond, Washington office, where he noted he was paid far more.

But he didn’t choose to stay after graduation. Huang wrote in a blog post that a mentor told him to look at a company called Google.

Huang relocated to China in 2006 to help set up Google China, Bloomberg reported.

At the company, Huang saw how challenging it was for foreign tech companies to compete with local Chinese businesses.

Huang noted that despite Google’s big-brand name, it struggled to recruit China’s top talent. “Contrary to what it seems, forming a team with strong fighting power is actually much more difficult for international companies than for local Chinese companies,” he wrote in one post.   

But he singled out Google’s management for praise, comparing their impact to China’s “reform and opening-up” era of economic liberalization in the 1980s. Google was “encouraging grassroots innovation, daring to try, highly concentrated in central power and enjoying the institutional advantage of focusing resources on a few big things,” he wrote.

Huang said he learned a lot during his time at Google and didn’t realize how lucky he was until after he left in 2007. “It was not until three or four years after I left Google, I started to realize how rare it was to come across and join a company like Google at the time,” he wrote. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (or at least once in ten or twenty years) and I was extremely lucky.”

Drawing on his experience in games, Huang turned Pinduoduo into a “gamified” shopping app with fun features to encourage daily visits. As Huang wrote in the company’s IPO prospectus, Pinduoduo is like a combination of Costco and Disneyland.  

As well as subsidies on orders, Pinduoduo offers users cash rewards for playing a game that involves bringing others to the platform. His approach has drawn masses of buyers, and, in turn, sellers, who pay for advertising, which is key to the company’s business model and generates more revenue than sales.

Many entrepreneurs fantasize about ringing the opening bell on Wall Street for their company’s public trading debut, but Huang preferred to stay in China. Pinduoduo started trading on the Nasdaq on July 26, 2018, but the founder remained in Shanghai, for a simultaneous bell-ringing ceremony with investors and customers.

Speaking to Chinese media on the day, Huang said he wanted to let customers take part, “but it might have been a bit of a hassle to arrange visas for them all to travel to the US. Isn’t it better that consumers, investors, all of us myself included, be here?” He tends to avoid long-haul travel to prevent his recurring ear infection from flaring up, he added.

PDD Holdings launched Temu in the US in September 2022, but the cut-price shopping app didn’t become widely known until it ran ads during the Super Bowl.

In just a few months, Temu stormed its way to the top of the download charts, becoming the top free app in both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

Temu operates exclusively as a marketplace, where sellers — predominantly based in China — offer a vast array of items ranging from fast fashion and makeup to electronics and homeware on its website and app. It was launched to compete with the likes of Chinese bargain fast-fashion site Shein.

Temu sells its supercheap goods using the catchphrase “shop like a billionaire” and focuses its site and app on the discounts that customers can get. It also pushes shoppers to buy quickly by using phrases like “almost sold out” and “only 29 left.”

Temu’s international success has helped drive up PDD’s sales and its overall valuation. The company reported $34.9 billion in revenues in 2023, a 90% increase on 2022. For comparison, Walmart posted $648.1 billion in revenues in the year to late January 2024 and Target posted $107.4 billion in the year to early February.

Huang is now China’s richest person, with an estimated fortune of $48.6 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

But his wealth hasn’t been stable — it’s a far cry from its peak of more than $70 billion in early 2021. It plummeted the following year but has since generally been on the rise.

Huang started 2024 with an estimated net worth of $51.6 billion, per Bloomberg. It’s since fallen by $3 billion.

But it’s still enough for Huang to just beat bottled-water billionaire Zhong Shanshan, who had been China’s richest person since April 2021, per Bloomberg. Shanshan’s wealth has fallen from $67.7 billion at the start of 2024 to $47.4 billion.