Colin Huang, founder of Chinese e-commerce behemoth PDD Holdings, saw his fortune shrink $5.7 billion overnight as shares of the Nasdaq-listed company plummeted Tuesday due to weak quarterly results reported the same day.
The 45-year-old now has a net worth of $36.3 billion derived from a company stake, although Huang stepped down as chairman in 2021, according to Forbes estimates. The former Google employee is now the sixth richest man in China, slipping down the ranks after he first clinched the crown as the country’s richest billionaire in August 2024.
At that time, PDD was reporting triple-digit revenue and profit growth on a quarterly basis. But on Tuesday in the U.S., its shares plunged 13.6% after disappointing results were announced for the first quarter of 2025. Sales only increased 10% year-on-year to 95.7 billion yuan ($13.2 billion) and net income attributable to shareholders was 14.7 billion yuan, down 47% from the same period a year ago.
PDD executives highlighted multiple difficulties on a Tuesday analyst call. External challenges such as higher tariffs have hurt its overseas Temu shopping platform, while the company is facing intensifying competition at home.
“In our global business, radical change in [the] external policy environment such as tariffs has created significant pressure for our merchants,” said PDD Chairman and co-CEO Chen Lei, according to a transcript of the call, “who often lack the capability to adapt quickly and effectively.”
As a result, the company has lowered fees charged to merchants and provided more support, such as helping them with marketing. It announced in April a plan to allocate 100 billion yuan over the next three years to beef up various merchant support measures. Those measures were expected to hurt PDD’s bottom line.
It is difficult to say when profit will grow again as that will depend on how PDD will execute its 100 billion-yuan support program, Wang Xiaoyan, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm 86Research, says by WeChat. During Tuesday’s call, executives didn’t elaborate on the pace of the company’s future spending on such support.
The Donald Trump administration recently abolished what was known as the de minimis rule, which allowed parcels valued at $800 or less to enter the U.S. duty free. Temu and competitors Shein and Alibaba’s AliExpress international site were able to expand rapidly in America under the de minimis rule and sell low-cost products such as $8 dresses.
Wang points out that Temu is now sourcing locally in America and recruiting U.S. sellers to avoid the higher tariffs. Despite ongoing trade talks between the two countries, tariffs on such small packages can still start at 30%.
The platform used to make much more by charging Chinese merchants for handling the entire shipping and customs clearance process for products shipped directly from China, Wang says. Domestically, it is also reducing merchant fees amid slowing macroeconomic growth, she says.
At home, the company faces heightened competition from rivals including Alibaba and JD.com, Eric Wen, head of research at Hong Kong-based research firm Blue Lotus Capital Advisors, says by WeChat. The e-commerce giants are now investing in so-called instant retail, which promises to deliver online orders within an hour or less, to grab business from each other, he says.
