拼多多上市前黄峥接受采访：谈与微信以及淘宝的关系（界面新闻）

没什么感觉，我跟以前一样。可能会有一些负面影响，对我个人来讲。我觉得拼多多的案例可能相对特殊一点。

Source: https://www.jiemian.com/article/2339319.html

Before the IPO: On Pinduoduo's Relationship with WeChat and Taobao (Jiemian)

> By Colin Huang · 2018-07-26 · [Original link](https://www.jiemian.com/article/2339319.html) (Chinese)
> Only Colin Huang's own answers; lines marked (Q) summarize the question and are not the interviewer's wording.
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

**(Q)** Your net worth may enter the top thirty of the mainland rich list; how does it feel?

No particular feeling; I'm the same as before. There may be some negative effects, for me personally.

**(Q)** Internet companies are crowding into listings lately; what's the common reason behind it?

I think Pinduoduo's case may be relatively a bit special. When we considered listing we didn't consider the market environment much; it was more our strategic choice, because Pinduoduo's attributes are still a bit different from other companies'. It is a platform company with stronger social attributes, and as its scale keeps growing, its public attributes also keep getting stronger.

Through listing, we hope on the one hand to make this company more public, so that it can do better and better under public supervision. On the other hand, through listing we can also give this company more public credibility worldwide.

**(Q)** Did you list because of the capital winter and a shortage of money?

If you saw the cash on Pinduoduo's books, you wouldn't ask that. From the C round on, we haven't used any of our cash, and our advertising revenue is very strong, so there's simply no such thing, at least for us there's no phenomenon of being short of money. And looking at this issuance of Pinduoduo shares, our overall dilution ratio is also relatively low.

**(Q)** Why didn't you go to the US for the roadshow to meet investors?

We did have a roadshow, I just took part fairly little. On the one hand, it may be that the price we set was itself fairly fair-minded, so we could save a lot of trouble. On the other hand, our team is very capable; everyone got things done, and investors didn't need to see me further to make a decision.

**(Q)** Why ring the bell in Shanghai rather than going to the US?

Is this such a big deal? Because I had an ear infection before, changes in air pressure still make me uncomfortable. With the bell-ringing we wanted to have more consumers take part, and having consumers and merchants all take part and all get visas would be rather troublesome.

**(Q)** Does this listing cover all businesses?

Yes. The other parts involving specific numbers I can't talk about.

**(Q)** Is the Pinduoduo model easy to copy?

As for copying, at the beginning there were quite a lot, several hundred, a thousand or so. Personally, I think cross-border copying is feasible in the internet field, like the early Copy to China, and today moving Chinese models overseas. But it's rarely said that copying someone else's model within the same market can succeed.

One thing I've never doubted to this day is that WeChat can incubate new business models. Now the WeChat app alone takes up 50% of your battery consumption, but think about it: how many business models has this 50% of power consumption produced so far?

**(Q)** Do you agree with Liu Qiangdong's (刘强东) "consumer experience matters most"?

Fundamentally, I agree with Liu Qiangdong's statement. But the commercial experience has to combine value for money, logistics and other experiences. I don't know what the background of the interview was where Liu Qiangdong said this. But Pinduoduo is the result of this kind of choice. For example, fruit: at a relatively much lower price, one or two pieces of fruit get bruised in logistics. Consumers can accept that.

For ordinary people, they'll curse when they curse, but if refunded they may come back next time. This is a question of trade-offs and balance in a company's values. When you can't have both, do you want face or substance? First work out whether this thing is a good deal, and then work out whether you want to show it off.

Now, unbalanced consumption is the most essential problem. This is the direction of our upgrade. Most regions should get fairness in consumption. China's unfairness lies in the fact that things in first-tier cities are cheaper than in small places. Electrical appliances in Suqian are more expensive than in Beijing. What really needs upgrading is upgrading from material consumption to spiritual consumption. What really needs upgrading is nourishing articles and books.

**(Q)** How do you handle conflicts with merchants?

The platform must ensure fairness, protect good people, punish bad people, and avoid the phenomenon of bad money driving out good. A platform ecosystem is rich, and a rich environment always has bad spots. It's like a couple quarreling: quarrel early and the conflict is exposed early, and it can be resolved early. Don't hold it in until the end, when one quarrel ends in divorce.

**(Q)** How do you attract young people?

You may not have done a survey; our share among the student population is very high.

**(Q)** Will you do offline?

Possibly. But we won't follow the trend into this new-retail thing.

**(Q)** Why stress moving agricultural products up?

Doing agricultural products. Batch agricultural products have a structural advantage for China's farm products [Translator's note: the original writes 农场品, "farm products", a slip for 农产品, "agricultural products"; the collector notes it is left as in the original]. America is farms. China's farms are scattered. In this situation, China's agricultural products become extremely non-standardized. This non-standardization is quite hard for e-commerce companies to handle [Translator's note: here the collector removed an insertion by the outlet's editor, not Huang Zheng's words, and marked the spot 〔编者插注已删〕].

After the group-buying model came out, for something like fruit, this model has a structural advantage. In the course of Pinduoduo's development, we found that the Pinduoduo model happens, by a lucky accident, to fit the current state of China's agricultural products.

**(Q)** What role does Tencent play after the listing?

Go through the prospectus: in the first year and a half, Tencent had no shares in us. Before the C round Tencent had none. At that time, our development was harder, and our dependence on WeChat and Tencent was higher. This also shows that Tencent's platform is fairly fair. At that time there were already many e-commerce companies in the WeChat ecosystem. In that situation, we didn't receive unfair treatment either.

After Tencent took its stake, we didn't deliberately seek more things favorable to us either. Now our volume keeps getting bigger, and whether in WeChat Pay or in commercialization, the two companies will cooperate more and more, and the degree of mutual dependence will also get higher and higher.

**(Q)** Moving from early self-operation to the platform model?

A platform is a very hard thing to do; at the beginning you can only sell yourself. After merchants were willing to come in, we found that self-operation and third parties don't conflict. You shouldn't be both referee and player.

**(Q)** What has changed in user growth?

Looking at MAU there's a change; maybe more people now download the App. But now, looking at the whole structure, user growth hasn't changed much.

**(Q)** The profit model, and rising customer acquisition costs?

Alibaba has already proved that advertising and commissions work. This profit model is mature enough and large enough in volume. We started doing advertising because we had ad traffic slots and let engineers do the allocation, and this model rose very fast.

Traditional channel customer acquisition still works very well. Before the first half of 2017, acquisition was extremely low, and it still exists now; the platform's scale is getting bigger, and service is getting smaller. In the last two quarters our marketing expenses have soared, and a very important reason is that advertising revenue is increasing. At this stage of ours, we want to spend money on worthwhile things. At the current stage, I think that's brand building. At the current stage, users' recognition of our brand is still weak.

Consumers seeing Pinduoduo on CCTV and seeing Pinduoduo in their WeChat Moments are still different. As of right now, it helps our traffic extremely little. Take the World Cup: everyone's drinking beer and watching the game; how could they download an App at that moment? It's something where in the short term you can't see customer acquisition, but marketing costs have gone up.

I think our users are still fairly evenly spread; we still want to target the broadest population, and see whether we can do better and more optimized in our new scenarios.

The way of dividing into first-, second- and third-tier cities is still the division method fast-moving consumer brands used for marketing in the last century. But in fact, this model no longer fits today's marketing environment.

**(Q)** With misaligned competition against Taobao, how will Pinduoduo upgrade?

There's no question of competing with Taobao. We have different users.

Future upgrading has two aspects. One is the front-end interaction model: can it be more fun, getting bigger gains from tiny innovations; or there should be more different scenarios. A scenario like "group buying" is very common, it exists in residential compounds too, and in theory more forms and consumption scenarios will also appear.

For example, we've now launched something like "Duoduo Orchard", which is also very interesting. It blends games, entertainment and shopping together a bit. You can water trees, and you can also steal your friends' water.