Pinduoduo has changed.
On the afternoon of May 4, Pinduoduo released its annual report, showing that its annual revenue in 2021 was 93.9 billion yuan, which was close to 100 billion. That's more than 58% compared to the 2020 figures. The net profit is as high as 13.8 billion. Compared with the net loss of 2.965 billion in 2020, it can be said that it is a qualitative change.
The former Pinduoduo, which burned money subsidies, seems to be gone forever. In the general downward environment of Chinese stocks, Pinduoduo, which is rooted in agriculture, has achieved upward growth in the cold winter.
It has been a year since Huang Zheng resigned as chairman of Pinduoduo.
Don't be the richest man
The annual report also disclosed Huang Zheng's shareholding. As of February 28 this year, Huang Zheng, as the founder, is still the largest shareholder of Pinduoduo after stepping down as CEO and chairman, with a shareholding ratio of 27.9%.
Pinduoduo, which made its fortune with WeChat traffic, has its second largest shareholder, Tencent, which holds 15.5% of the shares. The group of directors and executives, headed by the current chairman Chen Lei, accounted for 3.7% of the shares.
In fact, compared with the initial listing on the NASDAQ in July 2018, Huang Zheng's shareholding has dropped significantly.
At the beginning of the listing, he held 46.8% of Pinduoduo's stock, which was worth about $13.8 billion at the time. The following year, he became one of Forbes' world's 100 richest people with a net worth of 149.9 billion, and also surpassed SF Wang Wei, Byte Zhang Yiming and NetEase Ding Lei to rank seventh in China.
This year, on the list of China's richest people, Ma Yun Ma Huateng and ma Huateng competed for the first place. Evergrande is still in addition to the golden jade, Xu Jiayin ranked third with a value of nearly 200 billion yuan.
Then in the blink of an eye, 2020 was completely changed by the epidemic. The period when the real economy suffered heavy setbacks was also a big year for Pinduoduo to take advantage of the opportunity to rise. Pinduoduo's stock price has soared, with a market value of more than $100 billion in June. This e-commerce rising star that has opened up the sinking market has even approached JD.com, which has been deeply engaged in e-commerce for many years in terms of market value.
With 43.3% of Pinduoduo's shares at the time, Huang Zheng's real-time value surpassed Ma Yun and almost reached the top of China's richest man.
As a result, Huang Zheng's reaction surprised everyone.
Without warning, he announced his resignation as CEO in July of that year, and announced that his successor would be former CTO Chen Lei.
One summer in 2002, Chen Lei, as a Ph.D. director in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, drove to the station to greet new students from China. He and Huang Zheng met and became acquainted with each other, and they saw each other as they always were.
Time took the turn of the year, and the former senior came to pick up the student's class.
Not only that, Huang Zheng has also said many times that he is not willing to be the richest man.
He founded the "Stars Public Welfare Fund" to promote social responsibility construction and scientific research, and together with the founding team donated more than 10 million ordinary shares of Pinduoduo (about 2.37% of the total number of shares in the company) to the foundation, and then assigned 7.74% of the shares under his personal name to the Pinduoduo partner collective.
All at once, hundreds of billions of dollars were removed.
According to sources, the source of the name of the "Stars Charity Fund" is the great painter Van Gogh. The Impressionist painter who created Starry Night and Sunflower was mired in illness and poverty during his lifetime, and his work was rarely sought-after.
Huang Zheng has always liked Van Gogh's words, "I don't know what in the world is fixed, but I only know that as soon as I see the stars, I will start dreaming." ”
Dreamers
Huang Zheng, who has been successful in entrepreneurship several times, sees the vast possibility of sinking the market from the cracks of Ali Jingdong. From this point of view, he is obviously the one who dares to dream the most, and he is also the one who dares to chase dreams.
Huang Zheng came from an ordinary worker family, and with his talent and hard work, he won the Olympiad Grand Prix at the age of 12 and entered the Hangzhou Foreign Chinese School. This is the top local middle school in Hangzhou.
Then he successfully entered the computer major of Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University, was assigned to the class with the most inclined teaching resources, took scholarships, studied abroad, and walked on the classic life path of Xueba.
A turning point that changed his destiny came from Ding Lei. In 2001, Huang Zheng was a senior in college and was preparing to go abroad. Although he has not yet graduated, Huang Zheng, who usually dares to think and play, has already made a name for himself in the circle of programmers.
Fame reached Ding Lei's ears. At that time, Ding Lei was at the most wandering moment of his life. The bursting of the Internet bubble made NetEase's stock price fall below one dollar at one time, facing the risk of delisting. He traveled to the United States, looking around for investors to raise money and trying to get through the difficulties.
As a result, the financiers on Wall Street are more indifferent than one, and the only one who lends a helping hand is Duan Yongping, the former chairman of BBK and the father of Xiao Bawang.
At that time, Duan Yongping had already moved to the United States for love, and at the age of 40, he lived a retirement life of planting flowers and grass. He looked at Ding Lei's NetEase, in fact, it has not yet embarked on a desperate road, it seems to be in line with Buffett's investment philosophy, so he threw millions of dollars to help Ding Lei tide over the difficulties.
Ding Lei found Huang Zheng, who was also in Hangzhou, for a technical problem of programming. Huang Zheng helped Ding Lei solve this trouble.
Huang Zheng, who had not yet graduated at that time, faced with the big guys of listed companies and the generation of entrepreneurs on the Internet, and there was still some sincere fear. Ding Lei learned that this talent aspired to go abroad and decided to repay the favor and thank the young man in a different way.
So he introduced Huang Zheng to Duan Yongping, who was in the United States.
Fate is a wonderful thing to say. Huang Zheng really entered Duan Yongping's magic eyes.
Duan Yongping, who is hot and long-sighted, first pointed out that Huang Zheng joined Google early. Huang Zheng not only obtained a rare experience opportunity in the world at Google, but also quickly achieved financial freedom after Google's listing as an early employee.
In 2006, Duan Yongping auctioned Buffett's charity lunch for $620,000. In the list of guests he brought, Huang Zheng was impressively listed.
This was already an opportunity that Huang Zheng had never dreamed of. Looking back years later, he bluntly said:
"The biggest thing this meal meant to me was probably to make me aware of the power of simplicity and common sense. When you make judgments about a thing, you need to understand the background and facts, and after understanding, what you need is not wisdom, but whether you still have the courage to judge with reason and common sense when facing the facts. ”
Duan Yongping and this little brother are very close. He wanted Huang Zheng to simply resign, play golf with him, make some investments and enjoy life.
But Huang Zheng still has dreams. A year after lunch with Buffett, he resolutely resigned from Google, not to follow Duan Yongping as an idle cloud wild crane, but to return to China to start his own business.
He also has a staunch entrepreneurial partner, Chen Lei, a colleague who resigned from Google one after the other. The friendship between the two has not been broken since the University of Wisconsin.
From Ouku.com, Leqi E-commerce, Xinyoudi to Dream Seeking Technology and Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng and Chen Lei's partner is invincible.
Pinduoduo's new story
Unlike the previous generation of entrepreneurs, Huang Zheng is not keen on inspirational life stories.
He shows a calm attitude towards the success of Pinduoduo. In an interview with China Entrepreneur, Huang Zheng saw growth very thoroughly.
Pinduoduo's explosive user growth, data growth and advertising growth are "not something that one person or a team can do with great efforts", but with the help of the background of the times, explosive growth in the right direction.
He quietly hid himself in the interview, hidden behind the team, and was only willing to take 30% of the credit as a whole.
Huang Zheng believes that the popularity of the mobile Internet, the traffic dividend of WeChat, and the solid foundation laid by Jack Ma Huateng in the field of mobile payment are all the background of the era when Pinduoduo has taken advantage of the momentum to grow: "70% rely on good luck (the general trend), and the other 30% is the team's deserved." ”
Under such thinking, Huang Zheng's early retirement is not so abrupt. His idol is not Liu Qiangdong, who can't go to the stack, but Duan Yongping, who retired at the age of 40.
Every time he returned to China to participate in the board of directors, Duan Yongping always said to the old brothers of BBK, OPPO and Vivo: "Let go and do it, do a good job, do not close the door, do not have a burden." ”
Duan Yongping's mentality of seeing openly and letting go has a great impact on Huang Zheng, and to a certain extent, it has also contributed to his early retirement.
In 2020, Huang Zheng announced his retirement. He did not break his dream, but in an open letter said that he would "touch the stones on the road in 10 years."
He wants to control the content of potentially harmful heavy metals in potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, etc. through the control of the method of growing agricultural products, and control the beneficial trace elements in a controllable and standardized manner.
Huang Zheng also wants to help develop "protein robots", "can't become a scientist, but maybe have the opportunity to become an assistant to future (great) scientists, that is also a very happy thing." 」 ”
At the other end, Chen Lei, the current chairman and CEO of Pinduoduo, continues to work on the down-to-earth work of sinking the market.
At this year's earnings conference, Chen Lei did not shy away from the concerns of his competitors. Whether it is Taote or Jingxi, Ali and JD.com have already looked at the sinking market and made no small amount of actual investment.
Chen Lei said frankly: "We can appreciate that more and more platforms are indeed entering this field. Competition is also increasing, and we expect it to continue to increase in the future. ”
Chen Lei, whose flower name is "Potato", has sunk Pinduoduo to the field in the face of the dilemma of peaking market traffic.
"The online rate of agriculture is still very low, and many of the needs of users have not been met, which is why we are unswervingly investing in agriculture and developing the core technology of agricultural science and technology, so as to promote the inclusiveness of agricultural science and technology."
This is an area where the giants have not yet set foot in. The large input, low output, and solid hard work are regarded as the direction of Pinduoduo's attack in the next few years.
The traditional Pinduoduo slashing and slashing model, after countless criticisms by the Internet, finally began to slowly come to an end. This business practice of over-focusing on human reclamation began to be quietly abandoned within Pinduoduo. It is said that in the internal assessment, the team responsible for the slash project received the lowest grade point in the division.
On May 5, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced on its official website a list of 88 Chinese-listed companies that were "pre-delisted", and more than one of them was listed, and the stock price also fell.
As of the close of trading on May 6, Pinduoduo's stock price fell as much as 11.18%, leaving only $40.28 per share. Compared with the all-time high of $212.6 on February 26, 2021, it has fallen by $200 billion.
The sell-off and panic in the market is one thing, and the profits and growth in the annual report may indicate another possibility.
Recall that on the day of Pinduoduo's listing, Pinduoduo was eagerly welcomed by investors, oversubscribed, and the stock price soared. And Huang Zheng did not even go to the scene to ring the bell. He said he believed prices would fluctuate around value, and Duan Yongping told him that fluctuations were only on paper and would not have much impact on the company's economy.
Is it a swing, or a bottom? Time will tell.
Author: Wu Xin