Temu Founder and Billionaire Becomes China’s Richest Man

HONG KONG – After a few moderately successful ventures in gaming and e-commerce, Mr. Colin Huang fell ill and retired. At one point, the young entrepreneur stayed home for a year, wondering what his next move would be.

The former Google engineer founded Pinduoduo (PDD), an e-commerce platform known for selling low-priced products with huge sales, in 2015. He quickly climbed to the top of the list of the world’s richest people, with his net worth peaking at US$71.5 billion (S$94.65 billion) in early 2021.

Like many so-called billionaires of the Covid-19 era, his fortune collapsed as quickly as it was made, falling 87 percent in about a year. Mr. Huang’s fall was particularly acute because the slowdown in the global pandemic coincided with China’s violent crackdown on the country’s private sector.

Then something surprising happened: Mr. Huang’s PDD Holdings was back. Not as big as before, but stable, and its expansion outside China under the Temu brand helped counteract the country’s persistently weak economy.

As a result, Mr. Huang, now 44, became the richest person in China, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. With a fortune of $48.6 billion, he displaces Mr. Zhong Shanshan, the country’s bottled water king, who has held the top spot since April 2021.

Mr. Huang’s meteoric rise has been fueled by changing Chinese spending habits after the country’s housing slump turned into a prolonged slowdown. He is also the first tech tycoon to top the wealth rankings in more than three years, after government pressure to keep companies private has squeezed rivals like Mr. Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group. Along the way, Mr. Huang has also drawn protests from suppliers for cutting prices and setting punishing work schedules for his employees.

“Ma and Jeff Bezos were corporate leaders in their moments, but times have changed and Huang is enjoying great success with a different, lower-profile approach,” said Brock Silvers, a managing director at private equity firm Kaiyuan Capital.

PDD representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Math prodigy

Unlike Mr. Ma, a former English teacher turned Alibaba founder, Mr. Huang represents a new generation of Chinese technology entrepreneurs who began their careers with global opportunities in mind.

At age 12, his extraordinary mathematical talent earned him a place at the elite Hangzhou Foreign Languages ​​School, where he was a classmate of children of China’s political and social elite. After graduating from Zhejiang University with a degree in computer science, he left China in 2002 to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin.

Two years after graduation, he returned to help found Google China. He founded his first company in 2007, then sold it in 2010 to start a new one that helped companies promote themselves on websites like Alibaba’s Taobao or JD.com. When an ear infection forced him to retire in 2013, he came up with the idea for Pinduoduo.

PDD is “not about making people in Shanghai feel like they are living a Parisian life, but about making people in Anhui feel like they have kitchen paper and fresh fruit,” Mr. Huang told Caijing magazine in 2018. “The goal is not to be cheap, but to make users feel like they got a good deal.”