专访拼多多CEO黄峥：上市是战略选择 不关心公司市值（腾讯新闻《财约你》）

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> By Colin Huang · 2018-07-26 · [Original link](https://m.cls.cn/detail/262055) (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?

[This answer is the same as in [“Before the IPO: On Pinduoduo's Relationship with WeChat and Taobao (Jiemian)”](/people/huang-zheng/read/hz-dual-19-2018-jiemian-pre-ipo-interview/?lang=en); it is not repeated here.]

**(Q)** About 30 internet companies have listed in recent months; what's the reason behind it?

[This answer is the same as in [“Before the IPO: On Pinduoduo's Relationship with WeChat and Taobao (Jiemian)”](/people/huang-zheng/read/hz-dual-19-2018-jiemian-pre-ipo-interview/?lang=en); it is not repeated here.]

**(Q)** Why didn't you go to the US to ring the bell?

I myself don't particularly yearn for this thing. The other thing is that, although listing is indeed a big deal for many people, after all it's only a very small part of a company's growth process. We've always said we want to be consumer-centered, and I think at this moment, if we can invite our consumers over, and also invite media friends and investors over, and be together with everyone, that is far more meaningful than one person ringing the bell in the US.

**(Q)** How did you see this startup opportunity back then?

Pinduoduo's growth has the times to thank. I've also done other companies before; for Pinduoduo, relying only on one's own personal effort wouldn't have worked. Many things in China are being perfected; logistics and manufacturing are both growing.

More than three years ago, when I was resting at home, I saw that mobile internet, especially the change that phones brought to people's everyday behavior, was enormous. Now it's different: everyone is used to holding a phone, taking photos and chatting with people. But 4 or 5 years ago, people's behavior was different: people would stay in front of the computer for a long time, go out occasionally, and the phone was only used to make calls. But many people, because they were inside this, so [Translator's note: the original writes 所有, "all", a slip for 所以, "so"] did not feel the concrete change from the outside.

Of course Pinduoduo also has to thank things including the rise of social networks, mobile payment, and the nationwide logistics system.

**(Q)** Why hasn't capital backed a competitor to Pinduoduo?

I think there are two reasons. The first is that Pinduoduo is a platform model. Compared with others, say I make shampoo: if I make Rejoice, there may also be Pantene, and the phone field is the same, several coexist. A platform model actually has a stronger head effect, so second place is harder. It's not that Pinduoduo is strong, but that the model itself has this characteristic. The second reason may be that Pinduoduo was fast, that is, it reached a certain volume especially fast, so that capital's reaction, including the reaction of making a competing product like this, wasn't this fast. Making a competing product like this only makes sense when you are under a certain scale; if your scale hasn't reached it, making this thing has no meaning. [Translator's note: 「在一定规模之下」 can be read either as "below a certain scale" or as "under the condition of a certain scale"; the original is ambiguous, and the next clause ("if your scale hasn't reached it") fits the second reading. Translated literally.]

**(Q)** How do you assess Tencent's role and function?

I think, first of all, there's one point: in the first year and a half, even two years, of growth, at the start, in the A round and B round, Tencent was not our shareholder, so at the very beginning, it was all the same. After accepting Tencent's investment, I found that what's very good about Tencent is that it's a very tolerant investor. It never tries to change you; on the contrary, it helps out with operations and management and in places where help is needed, and that is the best. It provides a relatively fair competitive environment. Nowadays it's popular to talk about the business environment; Tencent's big system has invested in many companies, hundreds up to a thousand companies, and in this small virtual world, I think it has created a fairly good business environment.

**(Q)** Outsiders say Pinduoduo does the low-end market of fourth- and fifth-tier cities; what's your view?

Actually there's no such thing as craving it or not craving it [Translator's note: per the collector's note, the original question (about the low-end market) does not connect with the opening of this answer, "there's no such thing as craving it or not"; the original may have cut a follow-up question; left as in the original, nothing supplied], because it's very simple: if I really craved it especially, actually today it's very easy for Pinduoduo to do this kind of thing. For example, for users in Beijing, it makes a different interface; for users inside Shanghai's Inner Ring, it makes a different interface; depending on where you are located, instantly you feel it's upscale. But this doesn't quite fit our values. This is very inefficient, a bit affected; you're pleasing for the sake of pleasing. What we should do is: what does the broadest population actually need; are we letting more and more users have richer and richer products; is our overall algorithmic matching getting better and better. China's broadest population is indeed not the senior white-collar workers of the district we're in. But as our capabilities get stronger and stronger, it should gradually, gradually get better and better, and in the end will always cover this part of users. But we have no need, for a portion of people, or to cater to some kind of public opinion, to deliberately make a thing and say, look, I have this too; this is meaningless. On the contrary, it's precisely because we are the way we are today that so many [Translator's note: the original writes 那么消费者, missing a character; read as 那么多消费者, "so many consumers"] consumers support us.

**(Q)** Do you have plans for consumption-upgrade products in the future?

I'm not particularly keen on the term consumption upgrade, because everyone's understanding of consumption upgrade is different. The average age in Shanghai's Changning District has already reached 84 [Translator's note: so in the original, 平均年龄已经达到了84岁, "the average age has already reached 84"; the sense is probably average life expectancy (平均寿命)], and many regions of China now already have a world-class level of consumption and standard of living. Of course some people can still upgrade further, for example all French cosmetics, Alpine water, but is this what we need to pursue? I think when the gap between rich and poor is greater, whether we can let people in more regions each have their own different upgrades in consumption, fairness in consumption should be more important. In poorer places, sometimes consumer products are fewer and more expensive. Today's problem is not that we advanced people aren't advanced enough, but that most people's consumption is unbalanced.

**(Q)** Counterfeits, quality, conflicts with suppliers: normal problems or fundamental obstacles?

What you just said is quite right. Pinduoduo grew out of the cracks, and after growing out, the process of pushing open a space was not easy, and at the same time it also broke some existing interests. When you break the existing pattern of interests, inevitably some people are uncomfortable and some people are dissatisfied. I think this is caused by competition. On the other hand, as a platform in the process of iterating and evolving, it's actually very hard for you to have no conflicts at all among 300 or 400 million people, including several million merchants. Some conflicts will pop up along the way; the key here is the proportion, including whether we can make progress from resolving one conflict after another. Where Pinduoduo is lucky is that to some extent we've seen the road walked by predecessors such as Alibaba, so we may be able to avoid part of it and defuse some of the vicious problems; it's as if others rehearsed it once, and this is where we get a bargain. But the whole process, I think, is very hard for us to leap over. The road others walked, the suffering they endured, we all have to go through once ourselves. It's just that, since I may be learning from others' experience, I can go a little faster, but it's impossible to leap over this historical development.

**(Q)** What is your biggest worry about Pinduoduo's future?

For now we still have great pressure on personnel. Compared with companies of the same magnitude, generally they all have tens of thousands of people, and we now have only 2000 people. This is enormous pressure; many things there's no time to do, and manpower isn't enough either. We can only spend our main energy on the main things, but that leaves behind many imperfect things. That's the first. Second, the business is expanding fast, and our headcount expansion can't be exponential. Front-end consumers and order volume can grow exponentially, because there's fission and there's a market, but personnel: each person who comes in and integrates into a team is a linear process, hard to increase exponentially, so between headcount growth and business growth there will be a fairly large gap. The larger this gap, the greater the pressure on us, to the point that we even have to control the business increment to relieve the pressure of headcount growth. This will be our challenge for a long time.

**(Q)** What are the most important strategy and tasks after listing?

We won't change in any special way because of listing or not listing. Every day we're conscientiously doing things around consumers' needs. It's not that suddenly there's a ticker code on the stock market and things seem different, or that Huang Zheng has a market value on top of his head, so has this person changed? Actually nothing has changed. We today and we tomorrow differ by only one day, not, as the public often feels, as if by a difference in nature; I think there isn't one. So on this point, I think we'll keep going along the original road as always. Even with an event like listing, like today, all our employees are at work as normal; we won't give a holiday because of the listing.

**(Q)** Do you have expectations for market value?

I truly have no expectation; I think this thing is a by-product. If the goal of running a company is to get big, to get a high valuation, I think that's putting the cart before the horse. No company survives for this reason. It must be that in this society you've created unique value, whether for consumers, for merchants, or for the larger, broader society, and this value is reflected in the price. So price fluctuates around value, and price is forever a by-product of value, so what we should do is forever focus on long-term value. Listing will bring some distractions; what we need to do is isolate ourselves from these distractions.

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