The value soared to 385 billion! Business wizard Huang Zheng's wealth is close to Zhong's wealth
Pinduoduo (PDD. US) is a miracle in the e-commerce industry in mainland China and even the world, 8 years after its establishment, in 2023, Pinduoduo will collect nearly 250 billion in revenue and 60 billion in profit. Recently, the market value of Pinduoduo once surpassed that of Alibaba (09988.HK) (BABA. US), and has long crushed JD.com (09618.HK).
The sudden rise of Pinduoduo directly pushed its founder Huang Zheng to the top 30 of the world's richest list.
Fortune soared to 160 billion, making it the second richest man in China
Recently, the "2024 Hurun Global Rich List" was released, and it is time for billionaires to show their "muscles" again.
The list shows that technology madman Musk regained the throne of the world's richest man with a fortune of 1.67 trillion yuan (RMB, the same below). In China, the wealth of Zhong Sui, the founder of Nongfu Spring (09633.HK), shrank by 9% from last year, but he still became the richest man in China for the fourth consecutive time with 450 billion yuan.
Huang Zheng, who also ranked 39th in the world and 5th in China on the last list, squeezed out Ma Huateng, Zhang Yiming and Zeng Yuqun in this list, rising to 24th in the global list and second in China with a wealth of 385 billion, and became the second richest man in China for the first time.
Huang Zheng, 44, is the fastest growing entrepreneur in the TOP 20 Chinese entrepreneurs, with a 71% increase from the previous year, making him the entrepreneur with the largest increase in wealth in China.
The list shows that among the top 20 Chinese entrepreneurs, 14 have negative wealth growth, and only 5 have achieved positive wealth growth, and Huang Zheng is one of them who has achieved positive growth. Last year, large companies in the Internet and other fields wore tight clothes for the winter, which led to the shrinkage of the company's wealth at the helm, and Huang Zheng's jump against the trend this time can be described as menacing.
A 27-year-old student who achieved financial freedom
Huang Zheng was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1980, and when he was still in elementary school, he showed the essence of a scholar. According to his article "My Middle School and University", he won the Olympiad in elementary school.
At the age of 12, Huang Zheng was admitted to Hangzhou Foreign Chinese School. According to his primary school teacher, he was the only student in his primary school for nine years to be admitted to the secondary school.
After graduating from high school, Huang Zheng was sent to the mixed class of Zhejiang University, which is an experiment in elite education in colleges and universities, and the mixed class enjoys resources, opportunities and freedom, which will be of great help to him to study and work in the United States later.
When Huang Zheng was in middle school, many of his classmates were the second generation of officials and the second generation of wealthy, and these students were very good, and Huang Zheng communicated and influenced each other with them, so that he formed a different values and world view from other middle school students, and accepted Western culture more deeply.
In 2002, after graduating from his bachelor's degree, Huang Zheng went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States to study, and after graduating in 2004, he went to Google in Silicon Valley to start his first job as a product manager at Google. Later, coinciding with Google's entry into the Chinese market, Huang Zheng was fortunate to return to China with Kai-Fu Lee, Google's global vice president at the time, and participated in the start-up stage of Google China.
According to Huang, in the three years he has been at Google, he has basically achieved financial freedom. At that time, he was only twenty-six or seventeen years old.
At the age of 27, Huang Zheng was unwilling to be a "worker", but determined to break out of the world by himself. In 2007, Huang Zheng started his own business after leaving Google, and successively founded mobile phone e-commerce, e-commerce agency operation and game company. Although several ventures were unsuccessful, they provided him with rich experience in founding Pinduoduo and propelling it to the top spot in China's e-commerce industry.
Business wizards hold up the Pinduoduo empire
Before Huang Zheng founded Pinduoduo, he had to mention an important figure - Duan Yongping.
As early as 2002, when Huang Zheng was still a graduate student in the United States, NetEase (09999.HK) (NTES. US) Ding Lei will introduce a young talent to Duan Yongping - Huang Zheng. Duan Yongping appreciated Huang Zheng very much, not only took Huang Zheng to Buffett's lunch, so that Huang Zheng obtained the "true scriptures" of business, he also pointed out the way for Huang Zheng when he graduated from graduate school, and also made suggestions for Huang Zheng's entrepreneurship many times, and even gave industrial resources and direct investment.
Later, Huang Zheng said, "The biggest business education for me is Duan Yongping. ”
2015 is a turning point in Huang Zheng's life. At that time, he aimed at the rapid development of the e-commerce track. However, his entrepreneurial project did not follow the old path of Alibaba and JD.com, but founded Pinhaohao and Pinduoduo in a social group model. In his article, he argues that there is a form of product in which "the capitalist pays the ordinary man to buy the certainty of the allocation of his productive capital, forming a reverse insurance".
In 2016, Pinhaohu and Pinduoduo merged, the new company name was "Pinduoduo", and Huang Zheng became the chairman of the new company. According to the positioning, Pinduoduo adopts a distributed artificial intelligence and social group model, and is committed to providing consumers with more cost-effective products.
Huang Zheng later recalled Pinduoduo and said that a failed promotion made him more convinced that the model of "fighting" can effectively gather people's needs and inevitably create different social value in the future.
It turns out that "a slash" is not insignificant, because no one can resist the temptation of low price and easy use. And this positioning is also the "trump card" for Pinduoduo and Ali JD.com to carry out differentiated competition.
As early as March 2016, Huang Zheng said, "Our team may be 20 years behind the Ali team, and I think we may have the opportunity to make a different Ali in the new form of traffic distribution, new user interaction form, and new internationalization" "The form of the entire e-commerce market is undergoing a lot of changes, and the successful form of Ali today may not be the successful form of tomorrow." ”
In April 2018, when talking about business competition, Huang Zheng said, "We are competing with Taobao in dislocation, competing for different scenarios of the same group of users, and dislocation will grow faster."
After Pinduoduo was launched, it spread rapidly like a "virus", and it was forced to fight its way out under the "siege" of Ali and JD.com, and the scale of users continued to rise.
In February 2016, Pinduoduo exceeded 20 million paying users, and five months later, the number of users on the platform exceeded 100 million. In 2018, Pinduoduo's annual active users reached 385.5 million yuan, surpassing JD.com to become the second largest e-commerce platform in China. At the end of 2020, Pinduo's multi-year active users climbed to 788.4 million, successfully squeezing out Alibaba and topping the scale of e-commerce users in the country.
Not only that, Huang Zheng also copied Pinduoduo's "slash" model overseas, and launched the cross-border e-commerce platform Temu in September 2022, Temu means "Team Up, Price Down", that is, the more people buy, the lower the price.
Since its launch, Temu has continued to show its strength in overseas markets, conquering cities, and has now entered 50 countries and regions.
In just over a year, Temu has become the second growth curve of Pinduoduo in the global market. HSBC previously estimated that Temu is expected to gain 3%-6% market share in developed markets in the US, Europe and Asia. In 2023, Temu contributed 23% of Pinduoduo's total revenue, and this figure is expected to rise to 43% in 2024 and exceed 50% in 2025.
Disarmed and returned to the field, donated 100 billion
One person supported the entire Pinduoduo empire, and also made Huang Zheng's worth soar.
In 2019, Huang Zheng held 43.3% of Pinduoduo's shares, but later his shareholding fell to less than 30% due to the transfer of his shares to the partner collective.
In recent years, Pinduoduo has successfully turned a profit and its share price has continued to rise, and its current market capitalization is close to $160 billion. As Huang Zheng, who holds the largest proportion of Pinduoduo shares, his wealth value has risen as a result.
In 2019, Huang Zheng entered the top 100 of the Hurun Global Rich List for the first time, and his wealth exceeded 100 billion yuan that year, reaching 135 billion yuan, in 2021, his wealth further increased to 229 billion yuan, and in 2023, Pinduoduo's stock price rose sharply, and Huang Zheng's worth rose sharply again, successfully ranking among the top three on China's rich list, ranking third with a wealth of 270 billion yuan, second only to Zhong Sui and Ma Huateng.
The success of Pinduoduo has made Huang Zheng's view and business philosophy of "money" even more unique, he once said, "Money is a tool, not an end." ”
However, Huang Zheng, whose career is in a radiant period, suddenly made a surprising decision: he will step down as CEO and chairman of Pinduoduo in 2020 and 2021 respectively, and no longer serve as the helmsman of the "big ship" of Pinduoduo.
When stepping down as CEO of Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng announced that he would donate 10.11% of his shares in Pinduoduo, of which 7.74% will be used for basic research, social welfare and future management incentives, and 2.37% will be set up as a "Star Charity Fund" for scientific research and promoting social responsibility. According to the market value at that time, Huang Zheng planned to donate as much as 100 billion.
According to the "2021 Hurun Charity List" released by the official website of Hurun Report, Huang Zheng became the first philanthropist in China for the first time with a donation of 12 billion yuan, mainly donating 2.37% of his shares with the founding team to establish the Fanxing Charity Foundation to promote social responsibility construction and scientific research.
Duan Yongping once said, "Huang Zheng has long not taken the pursuit of wealth as his only goal, but immersed himself in the fun of building enterprises and creating value." ”
Some netizens said, "Huang Zheng's resignation and naked donation make people re-examine the values behind success." Perhaps, success is not the only criterion, the pursuit of true dreams and social responsibility are also worthy of our admiration. ”
Author: Far away