Fighting fakes unavoidable in developing China’s online retail market, says Pinduoduo CEO
Comments made by Pinduoduo’s Colin Huang Zheng have come at a time when China’s lawmakers are looking to make online retail operators directly liable for the sale of fake goods on their platforms
Serial entrepreneur Colin Huang Zheng, the founder and chief executive of social commerce company Pinduoduo, said counterfeit goods remain an unavoidable problem in China amid the steady development of the country’s online retail market.
Huang, who recently became one of China’s richest people after his company’s public listing in the United States, credited the efforts by Alibaba Group Holding in fighting fakes for helping other companies learn how to deal with the same issue, he said in a video interview with Tencent News last week, in response to a question about Pinduoduo’s stand against counterfeit goods sold on its platform.
“We have to go through the [same] road that other (e-commerce platforms) had gone through and the suffering they had suffered,” said Huang, who became China’s 12th richest person with an estimated US$13.8 billion fortune after Pinduoduo went public.
Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.
Huang predicted that Pinduoduo may develop its business faster than its predecessors, but said it was impossible to entirely skip the problem of knock-offs in the online retail platform’s development.
On Tuesday, Pinduoduo said it has been maliciously targeted based on plenty of negative media coverage it has received. That has prompted the company to lodge a complaint to the country’s media watchdog, the China Internet Network Information Centre.