Staff correspondent :<\/p>\n
E-commerce tycoon Colin Huang has become
\nChina’s richest man, an index showed Friday, capping an ascent for the former
\nGoogle employee whose shopping site Temu has sucked in consumers with its low
\nprices and all-powerful algorithms.<\/p>\n
Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings — which owns Temu and Chinese retail app
\nPinduoduo — is now worth $48.6 billion, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index
\nsaid.<\/p>\n
He overtakes Zhong Shanshan, the boss of beverage company Nongfu Spring who
\nhad topped the list since April 2021, as the world’s 25th wealthiest person
\nand the richest in China.<\/p>\n
Close behind them is Ma Huateng, known as Pony Ma — head of tech giant
\nTencent, whose WeChat is often described as China’s “everything app”.<\/p>\n
And in fourth place is Zhang Yiming, founder of Bytedance, which owns the
\nmassively popular TikTok video sharing platform.<\/p>\n
Huang, born in 1980 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, was a teenage
\nmaths whizz and a former employee of Google China.<\/p>\n
In 2015 he founded online shopping site Pinduoduo, which blossomed into one
\nof China’s most successful e-commerce empires — rivalling Jack Ma’s Alibaba.<\/p>\n
The app lured in consumers with huge discounts and a vast array of products,
\noffering sometimes staggeringly low prices in a fiercely competitive field.<\/p>\n
Its overseas iteration Temu launched in 2022 in the United States, where it
\namassed a loyal consumer base with ultra-low-cost goods made and shipped from
\nChina.<\/p>\n
Its success dovetailed with persistent high inflation that has pushed cost-
\nconscious consumers to hunt for bargains, and it has since taken off in
\nEurope, Latin America and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Despite only arriving in Europe last year, Temu has said it has on average
\naround 75 million monthly active users in the region.<\/p>\n
But its massive success had drawn accusations of unfair commercial practices
\nand lax safety standards.<\/p>\n
This year, consumer groups in Europe accused Temu of manipulating shoppers
\ninto spending more money, distorting their ability to make “free and informed
\ndecisions”.<\/p>\n
And in April, South Korean regulators opened an investigation into Temu on
\nsuspicion of false advertising and unfair practices.<\/p>\n
Last month, hundreds of merchants in China demonstrated at an affiliated
\noffice in the southern city of Guangzhou, alleging unfair treatment in the
\nsale of their products on the platform.<\/p>\n
But that has done little to dent the success of the firm, with PDD Holdings
\nannouncing in May that first-quarter net profit had more than tripled year-
\non-year.<\/p>\n
The firm’s US-listed shares closed at $138.02 apiece on Thursday, giving it a
\nmarket capitalisation of $191.68 billion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Staff correspondent : 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 sucked in 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, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index said. 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"yes","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_5980380192037842_108390337697511":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bangladesh"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10110,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10108\/revisions\/10110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}