Aug 09, 2024 01:15 PM IST
Colin Huang has overtaken Zhong Shanshan, boss of beverage company Nongfu Spring who had topped the list since April 2021.
China’s richest man now is e-commerce tycoon Colin Huang who moved from being a Google employee to starting his shopping site Temu that tapped into the country’s market with its low prices. Founder of PDD Holdings- which owns Temu and Chinese retail app Pinduoduo- Colin Huang is now worth $48.6 billion, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index said. Here are ten points on Colin Huang:
1. He has overtaken Zhong Shanshan, boss of beverage company Nongfu Spring who had topped the list since April 2021.
2. Colin Hunag is now world’s 25th wealthiest person and the richest in China.
3. He is followed by Ma Huateng, known as Pony Ma- head of tech giant Tencent- whose WeChat is often described as China’s “everything app”.
4. Founder of Bytedance Zhang Yiming, who owns the massively popular TikTok video sharing platform, is next in the list.
5. Colin Huang was born in 1980 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. He was a teenage maths whizz and a former employee of Google China.
6. In 2015, he founded online shopping site Pinduoduo, which blossomed into one of China’s most successful e-commerce empires.
7. The app lured in consumers with huge discounts and a vast array of products and its overseas iteration Temu was launched in 2022 in the United States.
8. Despite only arriving in Europe last year, Temu has said it has on average around 75 million monthly active users in the region.
9. However, consumer groups in Europe accused Temu of manipulating shoppers into spending more money and distorting their ability to make “free and informed decisions”.
10. In April, South Korean regulators opened an investigation into Temu on suspicion of false advertising and unfair practices.
