Pinduoduo eclipses Baidu to become one of China’s top five most-valuable listed tech firms

Pinduoduo, China’s third largest e-commerce firm, has eclipsed search giant Baidu in market value, making it the fifth-largest publicly-traded Chinese technology firms.

Pinduoduo’s stock price has jumped 51.3 per cent in 2019, more than the 16.5 per cent gain in the benchmark Standard and Poor’s 500 Index, as the company continues to expand its e-commerce services across China as a challenger to market leaders Alibaba and JD.com. Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

In contrast, Baidu’s stock price has declined about 35 per cent since the start of the year, as the search giant’s advertising income slowed and new entrant Bytedance announced that the company would start building a “general search engine for a more ideal user experience”.

Baidu’s market capitalisation has stagnated, even as fellow internet firms Alibaba and Tencent have surged ahead on the back of fast-growing industries such as mobile payments, gaming, e-commerce and local services. The trio are collectively referred to as BAT in China, and have been representative of China’s growing internet economy.

Currently, Alibaba is the most valuable publicly-traded Chinese technology firm, with a valuation of nearly US$450 billion. Tencent follows with a market capitalisation of US$396.5 billion. Meituan-Dianping, which runs one of China’s leading local services and food-delivery platforms in China, is also ahead of Baidu with a valuation of US$54.6 billion after listing in Hong Kong last year.