New Chinese tech billionaire Colin Huang drops US$2.8 billion as Pinduoduo shares tumble
- The Shanghai-based e-commerce company posted a 2.4 billion yuan net loss in the December quarter
One of China’s freshly minted billionaires, Colin Huang Zheng, saw his net worth plunge US$2.8 billion after the e-commerce company he founded, Pinduoduo (PDD), tumbled in US trading on mounting losses.
The Shanghai-based company reported revenue leapt more than four fold during the quarter ended in December, but lost 2.4 billion yuan (US$358 million) compared with a small profit a year earlier.
Shares of Nasdaq-listed PDD fell 17 per cent, the most since the company went public last year. That cut the net worth of Huang, who serves as PDD’s chairman and chief executive, to US$13 billion from US$15.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Huang, a prolific entrepreneur who started his career at Google, founded PDD in 2015 as Alibaba Group Holding and other existing e-commerce operators appeared to have a lock on the market.
Yet he distinguished the start-up by developing a mobile app with game-like characteristics and promoting group-buying discounts over social media like WeChat. PDD rapidly became China’s third-largest online retail services provider, behind Alibaba and JD.com.