On March 17, the Chinese company Pinduoduo released its fourth-quarter financial results for 2020, confirming itself as the largest e-commerce in terms of active users, even overtaking the giant Alibaba Group Holdings.
“Pinduoduo was founded in 2015 with a focus on agriculture and has grown to become China’s largest agriculture platform, handling more than 270 billion yuan (42 billion dollars) of agriculture-related products last year and connecting more than 12 million farmers with over 788 million consumers”.
The leading agri-focused technology platform showed that the value of its agriculture-related orders doubled by exceeding 42 billion dollars last year. Surely the outbreak of the current coronavirus pandemic has pushed many shoppers to make their purchases online around the world.
Pinduoduo in addition to having released its fourth quarter results with a press release, also introduced the new President Chen Lei, who before being elected CEO in July 2020 was the Chief Technology Officer of the platform. Colin Huang, founder of the 200 billion dollars company, after more than 5 years as President decided to work on research in food and life sciences by stepping down from the Board of Directors, now his successor Chen Lei holds the reins of the company. All this happens in a rather tense climate considering that online technology companies in China are experiencing a difficult situation due to the rules implemented by the Beijing authorities with the aim of stopping all anti-competitive activities.
Let’s now look at the company’s financial results for 2020. According to the platform, total revenues for the fourth quarter reached 4.07 billion dollars, an increase of 146% compared to 2019. The data show that there were 719.9 million average monthly active users during the last quarter compared to 481.5 million in 2019, the customers number therefore increased by 50%. As for the GMV, the platform reached 255.6 billion dollars in 2020. To conclude, Pinduoduo recorded a 35% increase in active customers, from 585.2 million in 2019 to 788.4 million in 2020, compared to the 779 million of its competitor Alibaba.
“We are now the largest agriculture platform in China and we hope that Pinduoduo can one day become the largest grocer in the world”, said CEO and newly elected President Chen Lei.