We would like to welcome you to a new chapter of China.Table. In these trying times, change is omnipresent, the tried and tested breaks up – and there are unique opportunities for new beginnings. For us, this now means an editorial change. From September, I will be taking over the editorial leadership of China.Table. China is at the center of global developments and we are aware of our responsibility to provide you with well-founded, accurate and in-depth analyses. Our mission is to shed light on the complex issues surrounding China, be they political, economic, technological or cultural.
Our current managing editor Finn Mayer-Kuckuk will leave the company at his request to pursue new professional challenges alongside Felix Lee. Under Finn’s leadership, China.Table has become one of the most trusted sources for analyses, background reports and exclusive information on China.
This change is also an opportunity for us to renew our mission and sharpen our focus to offer you, our readers, even more value. We want to shape this phase together with you. Your needs, interests and concerns are at the center of everything we do. Please feel free to get in touch with us on LinkedIn.
However, the upcoming period will not be just goodbyes; it will also see new faces at the table: Angela Koeckritz will be joining the China.Table team in October. As chief reporter, she will write about geopolitical matters, China’s foreign and security policy and relations with the Global South. Angela studied political science, sinology and art history in Munich, Berlin and Tainan, Taiwan. She was a trainee at the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and worked for over ten years as an international reporter for the German newspaper ZEIT. She was ZEIT’s China correspondent and Africa correspondent based in Dakar, Senegal.
Marcel Grzanna will also take over the role of head of copywriting at China.Table from October. Grzanna has been part of the team since 2021. He can look back on more than 30 years of professional experience. As a business correspondent for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, he lived in Beijing and Shanghai for nine years. His other areas of interest include Beijing’s human rights policy, authoritarian developments in Hong Kong, the activities of the Communist United Front abroad and Chinese cyber espionage.
Julia Fiedler has been writing for China.Table as a freelance author since February 2022 and joined the team in August as Senior Editor. She mainly focuses on the automotive and SME sectors, drawing on her many years of experience as an automotive journalist. She studied Regional Studies China in Cologne, focusing on Chinese law, and keeps an eye on legal topics at the China.Table. She has studied and worked in Kunming and Beijing.
Fabian Peltsch, who has been working at China.Table for over two years, will remain part of the core team. As Senior Editor, the sinologist and experienced cultural journalist (previously at European public service channel Arte and Rolling Stone magazine, among others) will continue to shed light on social issues, cultural trends and internet phenomena. He studied in Hangzhou and lived in China for several years.
Manuel Liu will join the team as a Junior Editor in October. Manuel was previously a trainee at the German newspaper Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger. He was born in Hamburg and grew up in China. After his traineeship, he wants to focus his work on the topics of China in Germany and EU-China.
This fall, the China Briefing and the Table.Briefings podcast will also feature distinguished experts analyzing technological and political developments in the Asian region, including the former head of AI at SAP, Dr Feiyu Xu, and the long-standing Chair of the European Chamber of Commerce in China and former BASF manager Joerg Wuttke, who joined the DGA Group in Washington USA this month.
Our team is determined to take on the challenges of change and inspire with new ideas, formats and perspectives. We thank you for your trust and loyalty.
Have a fantastic week!
China is the only country that has introduced specific tech export controls. How does it enforce these controls?
In fact, it is the only country we could find that not only controls dual-use goods, but also explicitly maintains a list of controlled technologies. Beijing has significantly expanded its existing instruments, such as investment screening. This gives it a much more detailed overview of technology flows than European governments have.
Why can this become a problem?
These measures are particularly relevant for us regarding Chinese investments in electric car factories, for instance. The Chinese government carefully decides which of its companies build factories for which products and where in Europe.
That is a considerable asymmetry. The Europeans invested in China for decades and handed over their technologies without governments knowing what was going on.
Indeed, in most cases, Europe lacks detailed recording and monitoring of technology transfers. Although international agreements such as the Wassenaar Arrangement for dual-use technologies exist, many products lack comprehensive data on when they were transferred and in what quantities. Even within Europe, cooperation and the exchange of information between countries such as Germany and France is still fragmented.
Recently, the idea was raised in Germany that the EU could establish a solar industry in partnership with China. However, your research shows that this would not be in China’s interest.
The Chinese government has been discussing including solar technologies in its control list since late 2022. However, this technology was not included as Chinese solar manufacturers expressed concerns. They feared that export restrictions could lead to a loss of market share in Southeast Asia and that European countries would try to organize their supply chains independently of China.
Where could China exert pressure on the EU in the future?
Industrial raw materials such as gallium and germanium are already subject to Chinese export controls. But it is also about things like the license for using the technology to manufacture wind turbine magnets. Or algorithms, such as TikTok’s. All of these fall under China’s tech export controls. Drones and materials for bulletproof vests are also affected by export controls, many of which are manufactured by German SMEs.
What scenario do you foresee in the event of a conflict?
China could simply stop supplying certain materials. In addition, Chinese companies could no longer set up production facilities for technologies such as wind turbines in Germany.
Given China’s use of technology in trade disputes, what should Europe do now?
The first step is to gather information on China’s progress in various technologies and on Europe’s own activities and capabilities. It is important to do this at a European level in order to get a complete picture. Moreover, we need more technology and industry experts in the ministries, as there are currently mostly only lawyers or long-standing bureaucrats. New expertise needs to be built up in the technology field.
Brussels is currently particularly upset about China’s policy of sharing militarily relevant goods with Russia without officially supplying weapons or even dual-use goods to its allied neighbor. How does this balancing act work?
China knows exactly which controls it can officially enforce without hindering its own companies or harming Russia, while still looking good internationally. The implementation of these controls is often designed in such a way that they do not affect Chinese companies. Moreover, if Europe sanctions one company, the next often simply steps in. This company can then continue to do business until it, in turn, is sanctioned by the EU. Moreover, Chinese export controls, for example, for drones, were designed to ensure that commercial Chinese drones were not affected. However, these have significant uses on the battlefield.
How is Europe responding to these challenges?
So far, Europe has been too passive and has tried to discuss with China instead of consistently imposing sanctions that would prohibit European companies from trading with Chinese companies on the sanctions list.
Is the core problem the fact that China, a systemic rival, produces so much important technology at such a high level?
The problem is not so much the quality of the technology as the fact that Chinese production is cheaper. For a long time, the doctrine was that cheaper is better, without recognizing how strategically China has built up this market power. China’s government and companies are prepared to accept short-term financial disadvantages in favor of building up long-term dependencies and reshaping the trade chains around China in its interests.
Consequently, is it worth producing goods at higher prices in Europe to become more crisis-resilient?
It is important to strategically analyze which products to keep in stock, even if this means higher costs. In some cases, tariffs can be useful to prevent Chinese products from undercutting prices. However, it would be counterproductive if Europe, the USA, Japan and South Korea all produced the same products at a higher price than in China, thereby creating overcapacity. Instead, Western countries should coordinate their production and utilize existing advantages, such as Europe’s position in the production of power semiconductors.
Are subsidies a practical means of achieving better technological security?
It is also possible to subsidize industries temporarily to make them competitive in the long term, as China has done with electric cars. However, subsidizing every industry is not realistic. That is why it must be decided which industries are important enough to justify subsidies. This could be the chip industry, for example, whose products are essential for many other sectors, or 5G, where Germany and Europe need their own providers for the sake of technological security. We are already subsidizing agriculture because food is essential.
Who in Europe should decide which economic sectors are important enough for financial support?
Only politics can set these priorities and decide how much this may cost.
Antonia Hmaidi is a Senior Analyst at the Berlin-based think tank Merics, the Mercator Institute for China Studies. This interview follows the publication of a new report that Hmaidi co-authored with Rebecca Arcesati and François Chimits: “Keeping value chains at home – How China controls foreign access to technology and what it means for Europe.”
China has so far only distributed a fraction of its multi-billion fund intended to rescue the ailing property market. What was announced in May as an ambitious rescue program now proves to be a laborious undertaking.
The plan envisaged that the People’s Bank and state banks would mobilize up to 500 billion yuan (around 65 billion euros) to support local state-owned companies in buying up unsold apartments and renting them out as social housing.
However, figures from the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) show that the program’s start has been extremely bumpy. So far, only loans worth 24.7 billion yuan have been granted under this program. The fact that hardly any money has flowed is surprising. After all, at the program’s introduction, the funds were criticized as being just a drop in the ocean. Critics called for much larger sums to reduce the stock of unsold homes.
For instance, Goldman Sachs estimated that the government would have to mobilize at least two trillion yuan (around 250 billion euros) to buy up at least ten percent of the vacant residential properties nationwide and stabilize property prices. This estimate is based on the assumption of an excess housing supply worth 20 trillion yuan (2.5 trillion euros) in 80 cities analyzed.
According to analysts, there are several reasons why even the much smaller amount of the rescue package is only being utilized hesitantly. On the one hand, there appears to be a lack of motivated state-owned companies willing to take the risk. After all, the banks grant the funds as loans for which the companies have to pay interest instead of simply handing them out.
Although these interest rates are not particularly high, companies fear that they are still higher than the expected rental yield. “The credit risks are still too high for banks,” Larry Hu, chief economist for China at Macquarie, told the Financial Times, adding that local state-owned companies lack the incentive to enter such a business.
However, even in cases where this hurdle is overcome, there is another serious problem. According to a report in the Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei, homeowners in Shenzhen, for example, have voiced their displeasure. The technology metropolis bordering Hong Kong is one of the first cities to implement the nationwide financing program announced in May. Since then, over 20 cities have joined the program.
Shenzhen residents who have already bought a home are unwilling to accept that the state is now offering a significant discount. They fear this will permanently lower the market price and keep it down, especially if half of their neighborhood consists of social housing.
Reports from Xi’an have caused unrest in Shenzhen, as companies there bought unfinished homes at around 50 percent below the previous market price under a similar program. As a result, many people prefer to wait and hope that the market will recover on its own in a few years. This strategy might pay off in a booming city like Shenzhen, but in weaker areas, the situation will likely be difficult without decisive intervention.
There is yet another obstacle to the rescue program in Shenzhen. Strict criteria apply before the Shenzhen Public Housing Group makes a bid. Most unsold apartments are supposed to have an area of 65 square meters or less. However, construction in Shenzhen is usually larger, so many unfinished projects are not included in the plan. Thus, a revision of the program seems necessary before the rescue program can have the desired effect.
China has a new richest man: Colin Huang, the founder of Pinduoduo and Temu, has overtaken the previous leader Zhong Shanshan, the founder of Nongfu Spring, with an estimated fortune of 48.6 billion US dollars. This rise is all the more remarkable, considering that Huang only founded Pinduoduo in 2015 and is now, less than a decade later, at the top of the Chinese business elite.
Huang was born in Hangzhou in 1980 and showed an exceptional talent for mathematics at an early age, which paved the way for him to attend renowned educational institutions. After studying in the United States and a brief stint at Google China, he returned to build up his own company: Pinduoduo.
If you talk to Chinese people in Shanghai or Beijing, you often hear that they can’t explain Huang’s rapid rise. They claim they wouldn’t use his shopping app themselves. But in medium-sized cities away from the top metropolitan areas, Pinduoduo can be found on almost every smartphone. While competitors such as Alibaba and JD.com have tried to bring more luxury products to their platforms in recent years, Huang has taken the opposite approach. In doing so, he has shown a keen sense of the zeitgeist.
Colin Huang developed a platform that appeals to price-conscious buyers. With Pinduoduo, he created an app that uses “social shopping” elements, such as group discounts and game-like features, to appeal to bargain shoppers in particular. Huang himself once explained in an interview that Pinduoduo is not about giving people in Shanghai a sense of Paris, but about ensuring that people in Anhui have kitchen paper and fresh fruit.
Another difference to Alibaba and JD.com lies in Huang’s clever international push. While Alibaba is active worldwide, Temu – the international version of Pinduoduo – has mastered the art of fast market access. Temu launched in the US in 2022 and quickly built a loyal customer base through extremely low prices and an aggressive marketing strategy.
Temu is successful because it ships goods directly from China and does not have to involve any other foreign middlemen. This means that the prices are often unbeatably low. This strategy, coupled with clever social media campaigns, has enabled Temu to quickly gain a foothold in Europe and other markets. Here, too, the right timing and a bit of luck came into play: Plagued by high inflation, Temu brought welcome relief to many people in the West.
In the face of pressure from Pinduoduo and Temu, Alibaba and JD.com have adapted their strategies to stay competitive. Above all, they want to prevent the new competitor from expanding in areas where they are already strong. Both companies are now increasingly focusing on ultra-fast delivery services. The aim is to get products to customers not just within 24 hours, but within a few hours or even 30 minutes. Through their reputation for reliability, they are trying to break Pinduoduo’s dominance in certain market segments.
Both Alibaba and JD.com hope the race will develop into a marathon in which the new challenger will eventually tire itself out. Pinduoduo’s business model is heavily based on extremely low prices and discounts, which attracts many customers in the short term but puts pressure on margins in the long term. If the company cannot manage its cost structure efficiently or gradually raise prices, it could find it more difficult to stay profitable. This could benefit Alibaba in particular, as it has diversified revenue streams with a strong cloud business and is less reliant on low prices.
Especially as Pinduoduo is likely to face a resource-straining battle in the near future, particularly in its foreign markets. Although Temu is very successful internationally, it faces increasing resistance in overseas markets. There are concerns about product quality and safety standards, and some countries have already launched investigations into unfair business practices. If this pressure increases, Temu’s growth could be hampered. Joern Petring
They are here!!! For the second time, the panda lady Meng Meng gave birth to twins on August 22nd at 1:03 and 2:19 pm in the Berlin Zoo. The excitement is huge. It is not unusual for pandas to give birth to twins. But the question is: Will they both make it past the first few months? This is because a female panda tends to raise only one cub, the other of the extremely tiny babies born is usually crushed.
Berlin Zoo is prepared. Even with Meng Meng’s first twins, the caretakers swapped them constantly so that their mother was able to breastfeed them alternately. It worked. The two bears, Pit and Paule, are now almost grown up and have been returned to China in December.
We would like to welcome you to a new chapter of China.Table. In these trying times, change is omnipresent, the tried and tested breaks up – and there are unique opportunities for new beginnings. For us, this now means an editorial change. From September, I will be taking over the editorial leadership of China.Table. China is at the center of global developments and we are aware of our responsibility to provide you with well-founded, accurate and in-depth analyses. Our mission is to shed light on the complex issues surrounding China, be they political, economic, technological or cultural.
Our current managing editor Finn Mayer-Kuckuk will leave the company at his request to pursue new professional challenges alongside Felix Lee. Under Finn’s leadership, China.Table has become one of the most trusted sources for analyses, background reports and exclusive information on China.
This change is also an opportunity for us to renew our mission and sharpen our focus to offer you, our readers, even more value. We want to shape this phase together with you. Your needs, interests and concerns are at the center of everything we do. Please feel free to get in touch with us on LinkedIn.
However, the upcoming period will not be just goodbyes; it will also see new faces at the table: Angela Koeckritz will be joining the China.Table team in October. As chief reporter, she will write about geopolitical matters, China’s foreign and security policy and relations with the Global South. Angela studied political science, sinology and art history in Munich, Berlin and Tainan, Taiwan. She was a trainee at the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and worked for over ten years as an international reporter for the German newspaper ZEIT. She was ZEIT’s China correspondent and Africa correspondent based in Dakar, Senegal.
Marcel Grzanna will also take over the role of head of copywriting at China.Table from October. Grzanna has been part of the team since 2021. He can look back on more than 30 years of professional experience. As a business correspondent for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, he lived in Beijing and Shanghai for nine years. His other areas of interest include Beijing’s human rights policy, authoritarian developments in Hong Kong, the activities of the Communist United Front abroad and Chinese cyber espionage.
Julia Fiedler has been writing for China.Table as a freelance author since February 2022 and joined the team in August as Senior Editor. She mainly focuses on the automotive and SME sectors, drawing on her many years of experience as an automotive journalist. She studied Regional Studies China in Cologne, focusing on Chinese law, and keeps an eye on legal topics at the China.Table. She has studied and worked in Kunming and Beijing.
Fabian Peltsch, who has been working at China.Table for over two years, will remain part of the core team. As Senior Editor, the sinologist and experienced cultural journalist (previously at European public service channel Arte and Rolling Stone magazine, among others) will continue to shed light on social issues, cultural trends and internet phenomena. He studied in Hangzhou and lived in China for several years.
Manuel Liu will join the team as a Junior Editor in October. Manuel was previously a trainee at the German newspaper Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger. He was born in Hamburg and grew up in China. After his traineeship, he wants to focus his work on the topics of China in Germany and EU-China.
This fall, the China Briefing and the Table.Briefings podcast will also feature distinguished experts analyzing technological and political developments in the Asian region, including the former head of AI at SAP, Dr Feiyu Xu, and the long-standing Chair of the European Chamber of Commerce in China and former BASF manager Joerg Wuttke, who joined the DGA Group in Washington USA this month.
Our team is determined to take on the challenges of change and inspire with new ideas, formats and perspectives. We thank you for your trust and loyalty.
Have a fantastic week!
China is the only country that has introduced specific tech export controls. How does it enforce these controls?
In fact, it is the only country we could find that not only controls dual-use goods, but also explicitly maintains a list of controlled technologies. Beijing has significantly expanded its existing instruments, such as investment screening. This gives it a much more detailed overview of technology flows than European governments have.
Why can this become a problem?
These measures are particularly relevant for us regarding Chinese investments in electric car factories, for instance. The Chinese government carefully decides which of its companies build factories for which products and where in Europe.
That is a considerable asymmetry. The Europeans invested in China for decades and handed over their technologies without governments knowing what was going on.
Indeed, in most cases, Europe lacks detailed recording and monitoring of technology transfers. Although international agreements such as the Wassenaar Arrangement for dual-use technologies exist, many products lack comprehensive data on when they were transferred and in what quantities. Even within Europe, cooperation and the exchange of information between countries such as Germany and France is still fragmented.
Recently, the idea was raised in Germany that the EU could establish a solar industry in partnership with China. However, your research shows that this would not be in China’s interest.
The Chinese government has been discussing including solar technologies in its control list since late 2022. However, this technology was not included as Chinese solar manufacturers expressed concerns. They feared that export restrictions could lead to a loss of market share in Southeast Asia and that European countries would try to organize their supply chains independently of China.
Where could China exert pressure on the EU in the future?
Industrial raw materials such as gallium and germanium are already subject to Chinese export controls. But it is also about things like the license for using the technology to manufacture wind turbine magnets. Or algorithms, such as TikTok’s. All of these fall under China’s tech export controls. Drones and materials for bulletproof vests are also affected by export controls, many of which are manufactured by German SMEs.
What scenario do you foresee in the event of a conflict?
China could simply stop supplying certain materials. In addition, Chinese companies could no longer set up production facilities for technologies such as wind turbines in Germany.
Given China’s use of technology in trade disputes, what should Europe do now?
The first step is to gather information on China’s progress in various technologies and on Europe’s own activities and capabilities. It is important to do this at a European level in order to get a complete picture. Moreover, we need more technology and industry experts in the ministries, as there are currently mostly only lawyers or long-standing bureaucrats. New expertise needs to be built up in the technology field.
Brussels is currently particularly upset about China’s policy of sharing militarily relevant goods with Russia without officially supplying weapons or even dual-use goods to its allied neighbor. How does this balancing act work?
China knows exactly which controls it can officially enforce without hindering its own companies or harming Russia, while still looking good internationally. The implementation of these controls is often designed in such a way that they do not affect Chinese companies. Moreover, if Europe sanctions one company, the next often simply steps in. This company can then continue to do business until it, in turn, is sanctioned by the EU. Moreover, Chinese export controls, for example, for drones, were designed to ensure that commercial Chinese drones were not affected. However, these have significant uses on the battlefield.
How is Europe responding to these challenges?
So far, Europe has been too passive and has tried to discuss with China instead of consistently imposing sanctions that would prohibit European companies from trading with Chinese companies on the sanctions list.
Is the core problem the fact that China, a systemic rival, produces so much important technology at such a high level?
The problem is not so much the quality of the technology as the fact that Chinese production is cheaper. For a long time, the doctrine was that cheaper is better, without recognizing how strategically China has built up this market power. China’s government and companies are prepared to accept short-term financial disadvantages in favor of building up long-term dependencies and reshaping the trade chains around China in its interests.
Consequently, is it worth producing goods at higher prices in Europe to become more crisis-resilient?
It is important to strategically analyze which products to keep in stock, even if this means higher costs. In some cases, tariffs can be useful to prevent Chinese products from undercutting prices. However, it would be counterproductive if Europe, the USA, Japan and South Korea all produced the same products at a higher price than in China, thereby creating overcapacity. Instead, Western countries should coordinate their production and utilize existing advantages, such as Europe’s position in the production of power semiconductors.
Are subsidies a practical means of achieving better technological security?
It is also possible to subsidize industries temporarily to make them competitive in the long term, as China has done with electric cars. However, subsidizing every industry is not realistic. That is why it must be decided which industries are important enough to justify subsidies. This could be the chip industry, for example, whose products are essential for many other sectors, or 5G, where Germany and Europe need their own providers for the sake of technological security. We are already subsidizing agriculture because food is essential.
Who in Europe should decide which economic sectors are important enough for financial support?
Only politics can set these priorities and decide how much this may cost.
Antonia Hmaidi is a Senior Analyst at the Berlin-based think tank Merics, the Mercator Institute for China Studies. This interview follows the publication of a new report that Hmaidi co-authored with Rebecca Arcesati and François Chimits: “Keeping value chains at home – How China controls foreign access to technology and what it means for Europe.”
China has so far only distributed a fraction of its multi-billion fund intended to rescue the ailing property market. What was announced in May as an ambitious rescue program now proves to be a laborious undertaking.
The plan envisaged that the People’s Bank and state banks would mobilize up to 500 billion yuan (around 65 billion euros) to support local state-owned companies in buying up unsold apartments and renting them out as social housing.
However, figures from the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) show that the program’s start has been extremely bumpy. So far, only loans worth 24.7 billion yuan have been granted under this program. The fact that hardly any money has flowed is surprising. After all, at the program’s introduction, the funds were criticized as being just a drop in the ocean. Critics called for much larger sums to reduce the stock of unsold homes.
For instance, Goldman Sachs estimated that the government would have to mobilize at least two trillion yuan (around 250 billion euros) to buy up at least ten percent of the vacant residential properties nationwide and stabilize property prices. This estimate is based on the assumption of an excess housing supply worth 20 trillion yuan (2.5 trillion euros) in 80 cities analyzed.
According to analysts, there are several reasons why even the much smaller amount of the rescue package is only being utilized hesitantly. On the one hand, there appears to be a lack of motivated state-owned companies willing to take the risk. After all, the banks grant the funds as loans for which the companies have to pay interest instead of simply handing them out.
Although these interest rates are not particularly high, companies fear that they are still higher than the expected rental yield. “The credit risks are still too high for banks,” Larry Hu, chief economist for China at Macquarie, told the Financial Times, adding that local state-owned companies lack the incentive to enter such a business.
However, even in cases where this hurdle is overcome, there is another serious problem. According to a report in the Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei, homeowners in Shenzhen, for example, have voiced their displeasure. The technology metropolis bordering Hong Kong is one of the first cities to implement the nationwide financing program announced in May. Since then, over 20 cities have joined the program.
Shenzhen residents who have already bought a home are unwilling to accept that the state is now offering a significant discount. They fear this will permanently lower the market price and keep it down, especially if half of their neighborhood consists of social housing.
Reports from Xi’an have caused unrest in Shenzhen, as companies there bought unfinished homes at around 50 percent below the previous market price under a similar program. As a result, many people prefer to wait and hope that the market will recover on its own in a few years. This strategy might pay off in a booming city like Shenzhen, but in weaker areas, the situation will likely be difficult without decisive intervention.
There is yet another obstacle to the rescue program in Shenzhen. Strict criteria apply before the Shenzhen Public Housing Group makes a bid. Most unsold apartments are supposed to have an area of 65 square meters or less. However, construction in Shenzhen is usually larger, so many unfinished projects are not included in the plan. Thus, a revision of the program seems necessary before the rescue program can have the desired effect.
China has a new richest man: Colin Huang, the founder of Pinduoduo and Temu, has overtaken the previous leader Zhong Shanshan, the founder of Nongfu Spring, with an estimated fortune of 48.6 billion US dollars. This rise is all the more remarkable, considering that Huang only founded Pinduoduo in 2015 and is now, less than a decade later, at the top of the Chinese business elite.
Huang was born in Hangzhou in 1980 and showed an exceptional talent for mathematics at an early age, which paved the way for him to attend renowned educational institutions. After studying in the United States and a brief stint at Google China, he returned to build up his own company: Pinduoduo.
If you talk to Chinese people in Shanghai or Beijing, you often hear that they can’t explain Huang’s rapid rise. They claim they wouldn’t use his shopping app themselves. But in medium-sized cities away from the top metropolitan areas, Pinduoduo can be found on almost every smartphone. While competitors such as Alibaba and JD.com have tried to bring more luxury products to their platforms in recent years, Huang has taken the opposite approach. In doing so, he has shown a keen sense of the zeitgeist.
Colin Huang developed a platform that appeals to price-conscious buyers. With Pinduoduo, he created an app that uses “social shopping” elements, such as group discounts and game-like features, to appeal to bargain shoppers in particular. Huang himself once explained in an interview that Pinduoduo is not about giving people in Shanghai a sense of Paris, but about ensuring that people in Anhui have kitchen paper and fresh fruit.
Another difference to Alibaba and JD.com lies in Huang’s clever international push. While Alibaba is active worldwide, Temu – the international version of Pinduoduo – has mastered the art of fast market access. Temu launched in the US in 2022 and quickly built a loyal customer base through extremely low prices and an aggressive marketing strategy.
Temu is successful because it ships goods directly from China and does not have to involve any other foreign middlemen. This means that the prices are often unbeatably low. This strategy, coupled with clever social media campaigns, has enabled Temu to quickly gain a foothold in Europe and other markets. Here, too, the right timing and a bit of luck came into play: Plagued by high inflation, Temu brought welcome relief to many people in the West.
In the face of pressure from Pinduoduo and Temu, Alibaba and JD.com have adapted their strategies to stay competitive. Above all, they want to prevent the new competitor from expanding in areas where they are already strong. Both companies are now increasingly focusing on ultra-fast delivery services. The aim is to get products to customers not just within 24 hours, but within a few hours or even 30 minutes. Through their reputation for reliability, they are trying to break Pinduoduo’s dominance in certain market segments.
Both Alibaba and JD.com hope the race will develop into a marathon in which the new challenger will eventually tire itself out. Pinduoduo’s business model is heavily based on extremely low prices and discounts, which attracts many customers in the short term but puts pressure on margins in the long term. If the company cannot manage its cost structure efficiently or gradually raise prices, it could find it more difficult to stay profitable. This could benefit Alibaba in particular, as it has diversified revenue streams with a strong cloud business and is less reliant on low prices.
Especially as Pinduoduo is likely to face a resource-straining battle in the near future, particularly in its foreign markets. Although Temu is very successful internationally, it faces increasing resistance in overseas markets. There are concerns about product quality and safety standards, and some countries have already launched investigations into unfair business practices. If this pressure increases, Temu’s growth could be hampered. Joern Petring
They are here!!! For the second time, the panda lady Meng Meng gave birth to twins on August 22nd at 1:03 and 2:19 pm in the Berlin Zoo. The excitement is huge. It is not unusual for pandas to give birth to twins. But the question is: Will they both make it past the first few months? This is because a female panda tends to raise only one cub, the other of the extremely tiny babies born is usually crushed.
Berlin Zoo is prepared. Even with Meng Meng’s first twins, the caretakers swapped them constantly so that their mother was able to breastfeed them alternately. It worked. The two bears, Pit and Paule, are now almost grown up and have been returned to China in December.
