The rise of Pinduoduo and Temu: profits and secrets | FT Film

I saw the entire story, it started with we know nothing about PDD and ends with we know nothing about PDD. Holy cow, the story was 30 minutes long !

I think the realproblem is the price in US is too high. Indonesia also have temu, but the price is not much different with another local online shopping applications. That's why temu isn't growing rapidly here. But US is crazy, once i tried to buy an LED for 4x4 RV in amazon, it cost almost 30 x from my local online aplications

I got a TEMU ad before this video. The irony.

Me as a former PDD employee gotta say, PDD is really secretive even for its own employee

The real mystery has always been why we pay 10-20 times the manufacturing costs of most everything

temu is selling dirt cheap stuff. of course it wont affect most companies, except for amazon. cos a item on temu could be listed on amazon with 10 times its price. resellers cant compete with direct from factory sales

Great film as always FT, very grateful for the quality material put out for free.

I agree that PDD/Temu is sus, but clarification on the employees not knowing coworkers' real names: In China it's VERY common for Millennials and GenZ's to go by a name that's not their birth name for business or personal reasons. Like if you do trade with foreigners often, you will use "Yasmina Chen" instead of "Chen MengYao." Or if you come from the countryside where it's the cultural norm to name your child terrible names (some believe bad names ward off bad luck, some have rules like "name the child the first thing the mom sees when she births the baby," etc.), you don't want your coworkers to call you PenJi (literally "Bucket Chicken", which is what happened to the popular Yunnan influencer DianXi XiaoGe) so you avoid giving your real name out.

Many ask why the US price is so much higher? The real reason is the currency exchange rate, USD to CNY is ~1:7, the average monthly salary of after tax in the US is about 4000 USD , while in China, it is about 4000 RMB. Basic living things are about the same number, like If you try to buy a can of soda from vending machine, it is 1.5 USD in the US vs 2 RMB in China, a meal outside is about 20 USD vs 20 RMB. Given this background, then a 14 RMB phone case that totally makes sense in China suddenly becomes incredibly cheap for 2 USD. It is that simple. Previously, vendors in Amazon would buy the $2 phone case and mark it up to ~$10 which is still very cheap in the US but now PDD/Temu tries to let those factories sell that $2 phone case to you, just the shipping takes 2 weeks. Finally, the question is why the USD to CNY is ~1:7 in the first place?

Actually all products in America is made in Asia. They just shove brands name. Even Apple 😅 costs dependent on type of materials but Temu really good. Surprisingly

Oh, no, they are now coming after the Pinduoduo after they take down Tiktok……

These guys just figuring out the basics of e-commerce, wow

Stop manufacturing mysteries. Ppl can sense that you are getting the same items at literally 1/3 the price, and that is quite motivating. Temu etc causes you to question the whole world, and why you have been paying so much in the past. That is the real mystery. And no. These manufacturers did not just 'appear.' Which is more likely: that they rapidly appeared and acquired decades of modern manufacturing expertise, or we were already consuming their products through re-branders. Temu etc is not the rise of a new business. It is the cutting out of the middlemen we recognize.

We are witnessing a scenario described in the book by Arthur Grandi. When the financial world is based on a weak currency like the dollar, chaos will continue and bubbles will enter the market duplicating the bubble of the financial system. The new formula described in the book "Grand Time" was created to strengthen the financial system and take it to a new level.

The real identity of P.Diddy is Puff Daddy

Amazon has been bothering me since 2 years for a package that I have returned but they lost it in the warehouse, they even sued me where they lost the case but obviously it was not enough them to stop asking me the fee for the lost product plus 2 times more fee for the time past. Temu on the other hand did not ask me to return some items I bought, besides not all their products are bad. Electronics are maybe skeptical, but jewellery, textiles like jackets, pants, blankets, house equipment are 8/10. It is certainly disrupting Amazon's monopoly in a good way.

While the actual details of Temu sound fishy, the principle sounds very much like we might finally be getting to something reasonably approaching a proper free market. Producers are in direct contact with consumers, and signals between mean near real-time, near optimal outcomes. While we obviously need accountability, the notion that we have proper accountability with Seychelles-based companies is also pretty silly... Advertising and brands are a bug in the capitalist system, not a feature. If only we could regulate and give transparency/accountability without immediately corrupting the entire system, we might be able to dramatically decrease prices for the masses.

Seeing this video made me install Temu

I was a customer of Amazon UK and I frequently wrote constructive reviews. This attracted many manufacturers to approach me for suggestions. I think Pinduoduo must have utilised this kind of customer-manufacturer feed back and recommendations to other people.

As long as Temu prices are still significantly lower than Amazon prices (of products that are likely produced in the very same factory), so much lower that I am willing to wait a few more days, and to take the risk that it might arrive slightly damanged, they will thrive. And apparently they know this well.