China’s upstart social e-commerce company Pinduoduo has snatched the top slot among all shopping apps in September on the Apple’s App Store download charts worldwide, beating Alibaba’s Taobao, online retailer Wish, and Amazon, a Sensor Tower report revealed.
On the other hand, Pinduoduo ranked sixth behind Wish, Club Factory, and Amazon on the list of top shopping apps by overall downloads including those from the Google Play store, which is currently not available in China.
As a strong contender in China’s e-commerce market, Pinduoduo spread from China’s lower-tier cities, bypassing pressure from giants Alibaba and JD.com. It rapidly gathered millions of users by offering big discounts and encouraging consumers to spread the word on social media.
The platform reported 483.2 million active buyers in the twelve-month period ended June 30, and hosted over 3.6 million merchants by the end of the second quarter, according to the firm’s latest earnings report. Its gross merchandise volume (GMV), which measures the overall volume of transactions in a given period, was RMB 709.1 billion (USD 103.3 billion) in the twelve-month period ended June 30, 2019, increasing 171% year on year.
Pinduouo has been also stepping into big cities. As of June, consumers from first and second-tier Chinese cities contributed 48% of the platform’s GMV, compared to 37% at the beginning of the year.
Huang Zheng, Pinduoduo’s founder and CEO, reportedly said that its platform’s GMV has surpassed that of JD.com.
The 39-year-old entrepreneur, a former Google engineer, has topped the newly-released Hurun Under 40s China Rich List 2019 with a fortune worth RMB 135 billion (USD 20 billion) while ByteDance creator Zhang Yiming is the runner-up.