Published : 2025-12-31
Pinduoduo has not only long established itself as one of China's leading e-commerce platforms, but its overseas expansion has also been remarkably impressive, with Temu, under the same parent company, rapidly gaining prominence abroad in recent years.
The success of Pinduoduo's founder, Huang Zheng, also known as Colin Huang, is surprisingly connected to the Warren Buffett. Looking back, how exactly did Huang Zheng steer Pinduoduo's growth into the e-commerce giant it is today?
Huang Zheng learnt the importance of "common sense" by attending the Buffett lunch
The main business of Pinduoduo (拼多多) is "C2M" (Customer-to-Manufacture), operating as a third-party social e-commerce platform that allows users to shop via "team purchase" (a form of consumption where multiple people place an order together for a group purchase).
Users can initiate purchases with friends, family, neighbours, and others to buy high-quality goods at lower prices.
Huang Zheng (黃崢) came from an ordinary, grassroots family in Hangzhou and was a "straight-A" student from a young age.
In 1998, with outstanding grades from Hangzhou Foreign Languages School, Huang was recommended for admission to Chu Kochen Honors College of Zhejiang University (浙江大學竺可楨學院), known as the "honours students' club", where he majored in computer science and also had the opportunity to study in the laboratory of Pan Yunhe (潘雲鶴), who was then the president of Zhejiang University and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE).
After graduating from university, Huang Zheng went to the United States for further studies and, through an introduction by NetEase founder William Ding (丁磊), met Duan Yongping (段永平), the chairman of BBK Electronics, who had also graduated from Zhejiang University.
Duan recognised Huang Zheng's talent and knowledge, and as they were both alumni of the same university, they became good friends. Huang later stated that Duan Yongping was the most important mentor in his life.
The reason for this is that in 2006, Duan Yongping specially brought along the then 26-year-old Huang Zheng to attend the "Buffett Lunch", for which he had successfully bid 620,100 USD.
Huang Zheng later expressed that this meal made him realise the power of "simplicity" and "common sense".
"A person's mind is easily corrupted. When you are making a judgement about something, you need to understand the background and the facts. After understanding them, what you need is not cleverness, but the courage to use reason and common sense when facing the facts. Common sense is self-evident and easy to understand, but we are blinded by the various biases formed through our growth and learning, and by the pursuit of our personal interests."
After graduation, Huang interned at Microsoft and also worked at Google, which was still a small company at the time. In 2007, Huang Zheng resigned and began his journey as a serial entrepreneur, achieving good results in ventures ranging from an electrical appliance e-commerce business and an e-commerce proxy operations company to social gaming.
In 2015, Huang Zheng founded "Pinhaohuo" (拼好貨), the predecessor to Pinduoduo. In September of the same year, he launched Pinduoduo from an internal company incubator.
The emergence of Pinhaohuo was directly related to what Huang Zheng observed while recuperating at home from an illness. At that time, he was suffering from a severe middle ear infection, which made him unable to work, so he could only spend his days on his mobile phone.
During this period, Huang Zheng unexpectedly discovered that although people spent a great deal of time on mobile social apps, the e-commerce sales generated from them accounted for an extremely low proportion of total e-commerce sales.
Huang Zheng: User's common sense is to pursue cost-effective consumption
After Huang Zheng returned to the company, he decided to launch a new project following this line of thought, and Pinhaohuo used the WeChat social network to promote group buying.
Initially focusing mainly on fruit, Pinhaohuo would first issue group buying invitations, spread the information virally through social communities, and then place an order after enough customers had been gathered.
Then it would send people to purchase and ship the goods. Group buying made product prices very low, quickly attracting a large number of users.
Huang Zheng's business philosophy has always been to follow "simplicity" and "common sense", he understands users' thinking very well, which is that whether one is rich or poor, spending must be cost-effective.
"We attract the crowd that seeks high value for money. He might buy a Hermès bag, but he will also spend 9.9 RMB on a box of mangoes. This has nothing to do with his spending power." This is the "common sense" of consumption for the average consumer.
As a comprehensive new social e-commerce platform, Pinduoduo's development speed is extremely fast, making it one of the fastest wealth creation myths in the history of China's internet development.
In its early stages, without any advertising, Pinduoduo relied solely on WeChat users to achieve over a million daily orders within a year, with a monthly Gross Merchandise Volume exceeding 1 billion RMB. At that time, e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and Meituan were already very mature and had a large number of users.
On 26 July, 2018, Pinduoduo, which has been established for less than three years, was officially listed in the United States. To this day, Pinduoduo has become an e-commerce giant with a market capitalisation of over 70 billion USD.
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