E-commerce tycoon Colin Huang becomes China’s richest man

Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings – which owns Temu and Chinese retail app Pinduoduo – is now worth $48.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index

E-commerce tycoon Colin Huang has become China’s richest man, an index showed Friday, capping an ascent for the former Google employee whose shopping site Temu has attracted consumers with its low prices and all-powerful algorithms.

Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings – which owns Temu and Chinese retail app Pinduoduo – is now worth $48.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

He overtakes Zhong Shanshan, the boss of beverage company Nongfu Spring who had topped the list since April 2021, as the world’s 25th wealthiest person and the richest in China.

Close behind them is Ma Huateng, known as Pony Ma – head of tech giant Tencent, whose WeChat is often described as China’s “everything app”.

And in fourth place is Zhang Yiming, founder of Bytedance, which owns the massively popular TikTok video sharing platform.

Huang was a former employee of Google China.

In 2015 he founded online shopping site Pinduoduo, which turned into one of China’s most successful e-commerce empires – rivalling Jack Ma’s Alibaba.

The app attracted consumers with huge discounts and a vast range of products, offering sometimes staggeringly low prices in a fiercely competitive field.

Its overseas iteration Temu launched in 2022 in the US, where it amassed a loyal consumer base with ultra-low-cost goods made and shipped from China.

Its success dovetailed with persistent high inflation that has pushed cost-conscious consumers to hunt for bargains, and it has since taken off in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere.

Despite only arriving in Europe last year, Temu has said it has on average nearly 75 million monthly active users (MAU) in the region.