Pinduoduo (NASDAQ: PDD) will invest RMB 50 billion (USD 7.1 billion) into China’s rural areas in the next five years, since “moving agricultural products to its platform” is a key strategy for the company, Pinduouo announced on a press release on Tuesday.
“We will continue to invest in areas including R&D in agritech, logistics efficiency, agricultural infrastructure, marketing resources, and cash subsidies to help connect farmers and consumers, and Duoduo University training,” said an unnamed Pinduoduo spokeswoman, in an interview with KrASIA on Wednesday. Duoduo University is the company’s platform offering online and offline e-commerce skills training.
The spokesperson added that the company hopes to nurture one million new stores on its platform focusing on agricultural products each hitting a yearly revenue of at least RMB 1 million. By the end of 2019, there had been 586,000 stores selling agricultural products on Pinduoduo, according to the press release.
The announcement comes as Pinduoduo revealed on Tuesday that over 240 million users have bought agricultural products on its platform in 2019, amounting to RMB 136.4 billion (USD 19.3 billion).
The 2019 sales in this segment more than doubled compared with sales of RMB 65.3 billion in 2018, also above the company’s prediction of RMB 120 billion. Despite the growth, agricultural products only accounted for 13.6% of Pinduoduo’s entire gross merchandise volume of RMB 1,006 billion in 2019.