Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1285
It took six years to become the second largest e-commerce platform in China, and after entering the community group buying and Meituan for two years without losing ground, Pinduoduo’s latest goal is to go overseas – to establish a cross-border e-commerce platform, benchmarking SHEIN, and the project is the most It will be online in mid-September.
This is not an unfamiliar new continent. The founder Huang Zheng and his core team had founded several overseas projects before Pinduoduo, and invested no less than one Pinduoduo.
After selling his first entrepreneurial project Oku.com in 2010, Huang Zheng began to get involved in the overseas business. He has successively worked on wedding dresses, fast fashion overseas independent companies – Lebei and Mocan, and an overseas game company – Friends Tower.
While not as impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of people as Pinduoduo, these companies have had success in their respective fields. JJ’S House, an independent wedding dress station under Lebei, once ranked first in the domestic vertical category; Mocan’s independent clothing station group ranked second in the fast fashion industry, with a single-day turnover of 8 million yuan, second only to China SHEIN; Youta is one of the most successful overseas game companies in China in the past few years, employing about 1,500 employees and a single game revenue of more than 1.1 billion US dollars.
Past entrepreneurial experience is an important part of Huang Zheng’s growth. Huang Zheng understands human nature and knows people in overseas business, and chooses trustworthy objects to be entrusted with important tasks. Among Pinduoduo’s core management today, Gu Pingping and Chen Lei have both participated in the overseas business in the above-mentioned companies. Among the first-level managers of Pinduoduo, Sun Qin and Lu Juanjun are all from the early overseas team. The unique management methods practiced by Pinduoduo today and the corporate culture of pursuing extreme pragmatism are all reflected in its past entrepreneurial experience.
Pinduoduo, which was born in 2015, captured the huge market demand after the popularization of the mobile Internet. China Mobile has just switched to 4G. Hundreds of millions of people access the Internet through smartphones, and WeChat has formed an ecosystem that is isolated from Ali. For the first time, the value of the sinking market has been seen. Pinduoduo seized the opportunity to create a 2.4 trillion super e-commerce platform with Alibaba’s Cainiao’s logistics infrastructure, Tencent’s WeChat traffic, and the introduction of low-cost white-brand merchants abandoned by Taobao.
Today’s market environment has changed. In the past four quarters, Pinduoduo’s investment in e-commerce business has continued to decrease. In the past two years, the most important new business in the past two years, Duoduo Maicai, has also entered a stalemate with Meituan, and it is difficult to make breakthroughs in the short term. .
An old employee who has followed Huang Zheng for many years said that Huang Zheng’s time and energy are always devoted to the things with the highest returns. Back then, he gave up his overseas business because of Pinduoduo. Today, Pinduoduo has started cross-border retail business again while reducing subsidies for domestic e-commerce business. This means that Huang Zheng may have a new judgment on future opportunities.
The hidden cross-border e-commerce
The second venture with Huang Zheng
Most people only know Huang Zheng’s three entrepreneurial experiences: Oku.com, Leqi.com, and Pinduoduo. But between these three experiences, Huang Zheng has also been involved in two lesser-known entrepreneurial fields: cross-border e-commerce and overseas games.
The B2C website Oku.com is Huang Zheng’s first entrepreneurial project. In 2010, Huang Zheng sold Oku.com to Lanting Jishi. In the same year, he founded Leqi.com to provide agency operation services for foreign brands to enter Chinese e-commerce channels.
In 2010, the entire Taobao revenue was only 5 billion yuan. Huang Zheng soon realized that instead of selling foreign goods to China, it is better to sell Chinese goods abroad. Huang Zheng found a new business growth point for Leqi – cross-border e-commerce.
Leqi began to incubate cross-border e-commerce projects in the summer of 2010, and launched its cross-border wedding dress e-commerce brand JJ’S House in September. Half a year later, the wedding dress business accounted for half of the company’s revenue. As a result, JJ’S House was incorporated into a new company, Suzhou Lebei Technology Co., Ltd. In the industrial and commercial registration information, Chen Lei and Gu Pingping are the first and second largest shareholders of Lebei. Chen Lei is currently the chairman and CEO of Pinduoduo, and Gu Pingping is the COO of Pinduoduo.
In the Oku era, Huang Zheng had three partners—Chen Lei, Gu Pingping, and Li Yufei. After the overseas business, Gu Pingping continued to manage Leqi, Huang Zheng managed Lebei behind the scenes, Chen Lei was in charge of Lebei’s technology and investment, and Li Yufei was in charge of the finances of the two companies.
Le Bei is headquartered in Suzhou, which is the largest wedding dress industry base in China. 70% of China’s wedding dresses are made by sewing workers in thousands of small factories near Suzhou Huqiu Industrial Park. An employee who joined Lebei in the early years said that at that time, Huang Zheng traveled to and from Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai for a long time. He attended Lebei’s weekly meetings on time every week and was never absent.
In the early stage of Lebei, the acquisition of Orku.com’s Lanting set the potential. 40% of Lanting Ji Shi’s turnover comes from wedding dresses. A wedding dress made in China costs a few hundred yuan, and you can easily sell it on Amazon, eBay and other platforms by changing the currency unit into US dollars.
Lebei employs about 200 employees, and Lantingjishi has nearly 1,000 employees during the same period, which means that Lebei employees need to work harder and longer. The above-mentioned person said that in the first few years of joining the company, he and his colleagues had almost no holidays and weekends, and worked nearly 400 hours per month.
At that time, Huang Zheng had a lot of experience in management. He summed up the “three three principles” internally. To gain his trust, employees need to do two things at the same time: one person can do the work of three people well; and get praise from three supervisors. He summed up the process of gaining trust into the principle of credit cards. Everyone has an initial limit just like a credit card. If you want to accumulate the limit, you need to fulfill the contract for a long time. If there is a mistake in something Huang Zheng thinks is critical, the quota will be cleared.
Chen Lei, who is responsible for putting the strategy into place, is also a strict manager. Another employee who joined Lebei in the early days remembered that Chen Lei often worked overtime until late at night. Once late at night, he approached a purchasing employee to inquire about work, but received no reply. Chen Lei sent multiple messages in the company group: “The bosses are still working, why are you sleeping? Why don’t you want to do your work well?”
The positive case that was encouraged was that an operation employee was temporarily dispatched to solve the supply chain problem. He had no understanding of the supply chain before. When he received the task, he even needed to open Baidu to search for “supply chain” on the spot, but the problem was Still resolved after he worked overtime for two consecutive weeks. Because of this, the employee was affirmed by the supervisor.
Cross-border business has brought abundant profits to Lebei, and even for a period of time, Leqi had to rely on Lebei for a living. But for most employees, it’s just a job, with lower pay and heavy workloads keeping some away.
A person who has worked at Lebei for many years said that he observed that Huang Zheng chose to hire people at 2-3 times the industry average salary after he founded Pinduoduo. The benefits of doing so are obvious – no matter how dissatisfied an employee is with their current job, it will be difficult to leave Pinduoduo, as few companies offer the same pay.
Another person who has worked with Huang Zheng for many years concluded that Huang Zheng likes to recruit two types of people, one is like him, smart and motivated people, and the other is ordinary people who are hungry for wealth.
Similar to today’s Pinduoduo, in Lebei, Huang Zheng sets goals, supervisors are responsible for implementation, and grass-roots employees only need to implement them in place. Lebei also pays attention to information isolation. Except for the first-level supervisor who can contact Huang Zheng, most employees do not know the real identity of the boss.
The above-mentioned person said that at that time, Huang Zheng thought that it was not good for the founder to go to the stage, and being known by more people meant that he would waste time dealing with trivial matters and could not focus on the really important things.
At that time, Huang Zheng often wore loose T-shirts and slippers in the office in summer, inconspicuous, but he would pay attention to what employees were doing. “He would check the employee’s web browsing history in the background to make sure that the employee’s energy was fully invested in the work,” said a mid-level employee.
Huang Zheng’s obsession with certain things was revealed at that time. A supply chain supervisor once said to Huang Zheng, “Azhuang (Huang Zheng’s flower name), let’s have a meeting.” This was regarded by Huang Zheng as a problem with his attitude, because this was not a meeting for Huang Zheng alone, but It’s a meeting everyone attends. The accurate expression should be, “Everyone, let’s have a meeting.”
A Lanting market person said that JJ’S House can be faster than Lanting Jishi in terms of new products, delivery, logistics, etc., plus large discounts and purchases regardless of cost, at the beginning of 2016, JJ’S House The sales of the wedding dress business surpassed that of Lanting Ji Shi, becoming the world’s largest wedding dress e-commerce company. An employee who participated in the project said that at that time, the monthly transaction volume reached tens of millions of yuan, and the daily order volume was thousands.
Being the number one in the industry with only a few thousand orders per day means the ceiling is coming. The low-frequency nature of wedding dress products determines that the repurchase rate is low. The company spends a lot of money on marketing to attract new users. This model is unsustainable for a long time.
At that time, Huang Zheng had gradually faded out of various businesses. At the beginning of 2015, Huang Zheng no longer appeared in Lebei. The employees later learned from media reports that Huang Zheng suffered from otitis media and recuperated at home for half a year.
Half a year later, he began to invest in Pinduoduo’s predecessor, the Pinhaohuo business. With the development and growth of Pinduoduo’s business, Chen Lei also left Lebei and joined Pinduoduo. On the eve of Pinduoduo’s listing in 2018, Chen Lei and Gu Pingping successively withdrew from Lebei’s shareholder sequence.
So far, Lebei and Pinduoduo have completed cutting in all aspects and are no longer related.
From Le Bei to Mo Can
don’t miss any chance
After Chen Lei and Huang Zheng faded out, first-level supervisors such as Zhong Qi (flower name: Charles Zhong) and Chen Yi took over Le Bei. Zhong Qi and Huang Zheng are both 2002 graduates of Zhejiang University. Both were elected to the Melton Foundation of Zhejiang University. After graduation, Zhong Qi went to the United States, and then worked for Microsoft. Around 2012, he returned to China to join Lebei as the CEO of Lebei.
Chen Yi was an intern in Huang Zheng’s first company, Oku.com, and has been following Huang Zheng since he became a regular. In 2018, Chen Lei and Gu Pingping were no longer shareholders of Lebei. According to the industrial and commercial information, Chen Naijian, a 67-year-old man from Shanghai, became the majority shareholder of Lebei. In an interview with the media, he admitted that his son Chen Yi was working for a series of e-commerce independent stations under Mo Can.
As the parent company of JJ’S House, Lebei continues to try more cross-border e-commerce businesses, and has successively established several independent clothing stations such as Floryday and Azazie. Azazie is positioned as a complement to the JJ’S House dress category, targeting the US market. Floryday is positioned as a fast fashion e-commerce with a unit price of $40, which is higher than SHEIN’s $10 unit price and better quality.
In 2016, Lebei carried out a series of organizational structure adjustments. The biggest change was the establishment of a new company, Mocan, which divided the independent station business under its name into three major divisions: JJ’S House, Floryday and Azazie, with divisions as the unit. Start new business separately. The production and research department is based in Shanghai, and Suzhou Lebei is transformed into a supply chain company to support the development of independent stations upstream.
Therefore, in the eyes of many suppliers who have cooperated with Lebei, Lebei and Mocan are the same company. Mo Can and Pinduoduo’s parent company, Shanghai Xunmeng Information Technology Co., Ltd., both used the same shareholders-Cai Hualin and Gu Yanping when they were established.
Employees who joined Mocan in 2016 said that during the peak period, Mocan employed thousands of employees and opened more than ten independent stations in its three business divisions. Facilitate deals on low-priced commodities for growth.
Cao Guangyao, a cross-border e-commerce expert and CEO of Dianshi Chuhai, understands a group of Chinese cross-border e-commerce companies that emerged around 2013 to 2015 as the success of the purchase model. They all seized the cheapest social media in the early days of European and American mobile Internet. Low-cost media traffic. SHEIN, JJ’S House, and Floryday have all been beneficiaries of this model.
Floryday is an independent fashion station established by Mo Can against SHEIN at that time. After recognizing that the consumer market prefers low-priced products, Floryday, which was originally positioned at $40 per customer, adjusted back to the price band of $10.
A Mocan employee believes that in the early years, they were not much different from SHEIN. They bought goods in the clothing market and then sold them on their own website. The gap between the two sides began in 2015. Xu Yangtian, the founder of SHEIN, dared to put all profits into the supply chain, and at the same time absorbed external investment, established a design and supply chain team of hundreds of people, and forced manufacturers to upgrade. Run the pattern to produce clothing.
Mo Can took a step forward. After 2017, Mo Can cooperated with manufacturers in Shenzhen, Dongguan and other places to produce. A middle-level employee of Mo Can believes that the difference in the input of the supply chain determines the upper limit of Mo Can.
At the end of 2017, the peak daily GMV (transaction value) of the three independent stations of JJ’S House, Floryday and Azazie reached 5-8 million yuan, of which Floryday contributed the most, with an average daily GMV of more than 3 million yuan. Mocan has become the second largest cross-border e-commerce company in the industry after SHEIN, but the transaction volume is only 1/5 or even 1/10 of SHEIN.
The above-mentioned person said that the daily transaction volume of 8 million yuan was the highest record of Mo Can, and after that, the performance of several business units began to decline. An important change is that traffic is more expensive and there are more competitors. In the past, the path of opening more sub-stations and buying volume to promote growth no longer works.
New projects appear again. During the Spring Festival of 2018, several employees of Mocan’s two business divisions, Floryday and Azazie, were notified that the company was about to incubate a new project, code-named “Project Wang”.
An employee who participated in the incubation of the project said that the new project brought together a number of first-level supervisors, and the selected new employees were directly selected by the head of the business unit and joined after a private conversation.
Afterwards, they were told to leave the company and collectively went to the Jinhongqiao Center to work. In Jinhongqiao, the project team used Pinduoduo’s office, and many old employees who joined during the Le Bei period saw Huang Zheng and Chen Lei again after many years. This year, Pinduoduo was listed on the Nasdaq, and its stock price rose sharply, with a market value of $30.5 billion on the day of listing.
Incubation of Pinduoduo game companies
After stripping, it became a hidden giant of overseas games
When Mocan was deeply involved in the cross-border e-commerce field, another game company briefly merged into the Mocan system. This is another attempt of Huang Zheng’s entrepreneurial career.
Huang Zheng said in an interview with Xiaofan Table in 2016 that some of the core members of Leqi had operated games in the early years. This project team established Shanghai Xunmeng Information Technology Co., Ltd. in 2013, which is his third entrepreneurial project. In 2015, more than 20 core employees of Xunmeng incubated a new project, Pinduoduo.
Gu Pingping is the person in charge of this game company. An early employee of Leqi introduced that at that time, the game was the fastest growing and most profitable new business in Huang Zheng’s entrepreneurial project after the cross-border e-commerce business. After that, it even surpassed the Cross-border e-commerce business contributes tens of millions of yuan in profits every year.
Dream Search Games started as an agency business, and has represented a number of web games such as “The Merry Three Kingdoms” and “Goddess Sword”. These games are accused of attracting players with pornographic and violent elements.
After the merger of Pinduoduo and Pinhaohuo in 2016, Dream Search Games also split with Pinduoduo, and began to share Shanghai Mocan with the cross-border e-commerce business as the main body of the company, operating under the name of Mocan Games, and the head of the company from Gu Pingping (Abu) to Cai Hualin (Musashi). Since then, in order to further distinguish it from the e-commerce business, the game company has changed its name to Youta Games.
At this time, the company has abandoned the domestic market and turned to overseas games, and has successively released a number of games such as “My School Girl Can’t Be So Cute”, “Underworld” and “Big Gang”.
In past media reports, games under Youta have been accused of having varying degrees of pornography and violence. “Underworld” has been banned from multiple platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.
But “Underworld” is also Youta’s most successful work to date. With this game, the income of the unknown Youta once ranked seventh among Chinese game overseas companies. An employee who joined the “Underworld” project team in 2018 said that at that time, the project team worked overtime throughout the year, and many people slept in the company’s dormitory. By the first quarter of 2021, “Underworld” has contributed $1.1 billion in revenue to Youta.
The staff of Youta at that time was about 1,000 people. A person in the game industry believes that Youta has grown into an excellent overseas game company, but this company is very low-key and belongs to a small hidden giant.
Another game practitioner said that the games launched by Youta in the early stage were rough in production, and the company’s characteristic was to grow by relying on a large number of purchases.
According to the monitoring of App Growing Global, Youta’s “Underworld” and “Big Gang” ranked sixth and seventh respectively in the global mobile game purchase market in 2019. They are the most popular Chinese game manufacturers in the past few years in terms of advertising. One of the most expensive companies.
In terms of management, Youta is similar to Pinduoduo. Cai Hualin pays attention to everything in detail. The management sets goals, and the supervisors and ordinary employees of each business line are responsible for implementation.
The person in charge of a headhunting company that cooperates with Youta said that Youta was more inclined to recruit fresh graduates in the early days, focusing on being cheap and easy to use, hoping that employees could continue to work overtime and perform well.
According to the memories of many employees, in 2015 and 2016, Huang Zheng and Gu Pingping both attended the annual meeting of the game company. The 2017 annual meeting also displayed the famous brands of A Zhuang and Abu, but they did not attend and have not been there since.
The game company spun off from the Mocan system in 2018 and established a new company, Shanghai Youta Network Technology Co., Ltd. The biggest connection with Pinduoduo is that Gu Yanping and Cai Hualin have once again become shareholders of Youta.
New employees who joined Youta after 2018 have rarely felt the connection between the company and Pinduoduo, but employees can search for Pinduoduo executives through Knock, the same enterprise collaboration tool of Pinduoduo. A Youta employee remembered that someone had messaged Abu on Knock in 2019. After that, the technical department updated the app, and they could no longer find Pinduoduo-related names.
Youta and Pinduoduo still have some business contacts. A number of Pinduoduo employees and Youta employees told us that Youta has developed a number of mini games for Pinduoduo, and the connection with Youta’s needs is usually handled by Shizi (flower name), the technical director of Pinduoduo’s market.
Currently, both Youta and Pinduoduo are working in Shanghai Jinhongqiao Center, and Youta employs about 1,500 employees. Over the past year, Youta is still hiring new employees. A Youta employee revealed that with the disappearance of the traffic bonus, Youta is also transforming. At present, three game projects with high-quality positioning have been established.
Inside the company, Cai Hualin (Musashi) once said that the company has sufficient book capital for everyone to try.
Selling fake VOVA, an adventure
In 2018, the team of the secret project “Project Wang” under the cross-border e-commerce company Mocan moved from Greenland Business Building to Jinhongqiao, and soon the project was officially launched into the market under the VOVA brand. VOVA is positioned as a cross-border e-commerce platform for all categories. Domestic sellers deliver goods to transit warehouses, and from transit warehouses to European consumers (mainly by sea). In the cross-border circle at that time, it was known as “European Pinduoduo”.
At the end of 2019, VOVA was spun off from Mocan and became Shanghai Grove Information Technology Co., Ltd. This new company has nothing to do with Huang Zheng in terms of equity, business and industry, and has nothing to do with Pinduoduo, Lebei, and Mocan.
A person who has experienced Leqi, Lebei, Mocan and other companies said that the founders of the company and Huang Zheng are friends, and Pinduoduo is at most a brother company. “Pinduoduo has many brother companies, all of whom are friends of Huang Zheng. Tencent and NetEase are brother companies, and Lebei and Pinduoduo are also brothers.”
He said it was normal to visit each other, guide business, and borrow offices because the bosses knew each other well.
In 2018 and 2019, many employees met Huang Zheng and Chen Lei in the office area to meet with VOVA management. Chen Lei also personally participated in the project for a short time, and wrote some codes for VOVA according to the product requirements. A VOVA employee who participated in the project said that the company’s management had conveyed an idea in early 2018: VOVA will surpass Wish in about three years, and then Pinduoduo will acquire VOVA and become a Pinduoduo international e-commerce department similar to AliExpress. At the beginning of the project, the company’s intranet was named beatwish.com.
But after 2020, VOVA employees never saw Huang Zheng again. At that time, he had stepped down as the CEO of Pinduoduo and devoted himself to the community group buying business – Duoduo Shopping.
In the early days of VOVA’s launch, employees put white-label products on the platform, and bought traffic from Facebook and Google to test whether the low-cost white-label model could work abroad. Employees work six days a week from 11am to 11pm. A few months after its establishment, the average daily order volume of the platform has reached tens of thousands, and the business model has been proven. After that, VOVA returned to Greenland Business Building from Jinhongqiao and started recruiting in the name of Mocan, Lebei, Yingtailai and other companies, and the team expanded to more than 200 people.
VOVA started to expand aggressively after validating the mode. Many VOVA employees remember that in 2019 and 2020, the company has set a goal of doubling GMV every year.
An executive of a cross-border e-commerce platform said that for a cross-border e-commerce platform that was established in 2018 and was significantly later than its peers, there are only two ways to grow rapidly, with more low-priced products than its peers, or Introduce imitations.
VOVA advertises as a low-cost white brand, but it is the imitation products that really contribute the most revenue to the platform. The above-mentioned executives met with a VOVA business executive at the end of 2019, and the other party told him that sales of imitation products accounted for more than half of VOVA’s GMV on a daily basis.
A VOVA operation employee said that the platform first began to sell imitation brands of Nike and Adidas, and the price was only 2-3% of the original. Later, it expanded to categories such as clothing, bags and accessories, and many luxury brands such as Hermès, LV, and Gucci were involved, and such products were referred to as “Brand” internally.
A number of merchants who have access to VOVA said that they have been invited to operate the platform since 2019, requiring multiple merchants to participate in the common imitation of a product, internal bidding, and the merchant with the lowest price can obtain the platform’s traffic support.
In order to acquire more new users, the product and technology division began to pull new growth. A product employee recalled that the method of pulling new users is similar to that of Pinduoduo, such as inviting new users to receive cash. In order to avoid risks, old users can obtain tokens after pulling new ones, which can be exchanged for real money in their wallets for withdrawal.
The platform also has long-term promotion of new iPhone, iPad and other activities. The VOVA staff who designed the event said that these lottery draws will not actually be drawn in the end, and the winners seen by users are actually a string of digital codes in the background. In 2019, such events brought tens of thousands of new users to the platform every day.
VOVA’s performance has climbed rapidly, with GMV exceeding 2 billion yuan in 2019. Employees in the operations and product departments said that no less than 60% of the 2 billion yuan came from imitation products, and the main consumers came from five countries: France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain.
An early employee said that VOVA also tried to focus on the Southeast Asian market, but gave up because of fierce competition and poor sales. The U.S. and Middle East markets were directly abandoned. He speculated that because customs supervision was too strict, it was more difficult for goods to pass.
Beginning in 2020, VOVA management has gradually realized the problem of imitation products, requiring more traffic for white cards in promotional activities. However, after the implementation, it was found that users were not very interested in white-brand products, GMV experienced a serious dive, and the management allowed the algorithm department to increase the traffic support of imitation products.
VOVA also tried to build local warehouses in Europe, packaged the goods to several warehouses in Europe, and tried to attract consumers with faster logistics, but there was still no significant increase in single volume.
The path to relying on imitation strides ends in September 2021. On September 16th, on the 11th floor of Greenland Business Building, Changning District, Shanghai, more than 20 policemen from the Economic Investigation Corps of Shanghai Public Security Bureau came to the door and summoned VOVA management members to the company meeting room for questioning. A few hours later, the police took away a number of people in charge, including Chen Yi.
Half a month later, the supplier who called the police to recover the payment learned from the Shanghai police that VOVA was suspected of selling products with counterfeit registered trademarks, and the relevant personnel were under investigation.
From October 2021, the VOVA servers are no longer in operation and the VOVA brand has since disappeared.
The VOVA story is over, but the aftermath remains. Last year, hundreds of suppliers went to Suzhou and Shanghai to ask for money. After the VOVA accident, the suppliers realized that they had never signed a formal cooperation contract with Grove, the parent company of VOVA. Previously, they were told that Mo Can and Le Bei were the same company, and they would receive punctual payments from the platform twice on the 1st and 15th of each month, and they never defaulted.
The accident also affected companies such as Mocan and Lebei. A Mocan employee said that several independent stations under Mocan were seriously out of stock in October and November, and GMV dropped by more than 50%. Since then, many companies such as Suzhou Lebei, Shanghai Mocan, and Shenzhen Mocan have successively started laying off staff.
But a month later, a new vest surfaced. A former VOVA employee received an interview invitation from a HR company named Belomi Network Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. on the recruitment website. The other party informed him that their cross-border e-commerce company was recruiting technical engineers and invited him to participate in the interview.
According to public information, the company was registered in January 2021, and its industrial and commercial registration address is the same as that of VOVA, both on the 10th floor of Shanghai Greenland Business Building. On multiple recruitment platforms such as Boss Zhipin, the company moved to Guangzhou to recruit employees in various positions such as operations, logistics, and supply chain. Palami is wholly-owned by a Hong Kong company, Blush Mark Hong Kong Limited, and the holder is Zhong Qi.
Fighting overseas again, there is no miracle
In the face of overseas, how cheap can Pinduoduo be? Can the logistics speed be guaranteed? The advantages of the past have become uncertain today. The four links and one delivery that grew up with Taobao supported the early development of Pinduoduo. Packages are sent from Yiwu, and one yuan per order can be delivered to most parts of the country in two or three days. There is no such cheap and fast logistics in the United States. The cost of cross-border express delivery that Pinduoduo may use is higher than that of domestic express delivery, and the speed is much slower than that of Amazon. Amazon has more than 110 large distribution centers in the United States, which can achieve next-day delivery in 98% of the United States.
The regulatory environment is another issue. In 2018, when Pinduoduo was listed on Nasdaq, there were still a large number of counterfeit and shoddy goods on the platform. At that time, both the government and the public were more tolerant of a new Internet company. Pinduoduo has been able to gradually improve its platform governance, and a large number of counterfeit and shoddy goods have been cleaned up. In the later stage, Pinduoduo also tried to use “tens of billions of subsidies” and other activities to attract brand owners to join and re-establish its image.
Today, Pinduoduo has launched its overseas business, and it has to face the US market, which is quite sensitive to selling prices and prone to lawsuits by victims. At the same time, the company is no longer the unfamiliar name it used to be. The market value of Pinduoduo was close to 200 billion US dollars at one time, and it is already a large Nasdaq-listed company, and its every move will be watched by regulators, the media, and the public.
This means that the various new methods of “cutting a knife and getting cash” created by Pinduoduo cannot be simply copied to the US market. They have no successful path to rely on. The team needs to adapt to the market with new rules and new methods.
Huang Zheng, who is keen on entrepreneurship, has returned to the state of a challenger. But in today’s market environment, the miracles left to him may not be as many as in the past.
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