黄峥上市前开口：拼多多成功70%靠运气 已不可能复制（《中国企业家》）

Before the IPO: 70% of Pinduoduo's Success Was Luck and Can't Be Repeated (China Entrepreneur)

> By Colin Huang · 2018-07-26 · [Original link](https://finance.sina.cn/chanjing/gsxw/2018-07-26/detail-ihfvkitx2448634.d.html?vt=4) (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)** What does listing now have to do with the current capital environment?

I think cold and hot are always relative. When it's cold, if you have a good project, many people will still invest; when it's hot, a rotten project still gets no investment.

Pinduoduo's business form itself has very strong public attributes. Although its time so far is very short, its scale isn't small; it's a company with public social responsibility, so I hope to bring it to the public market earlier to accept supervision and make more of its operating conditions and data public. Its credibility and public trust will also be stronger, and some rumors will collapse on their own.

**(Q)** Will anti-counterfeiting efforts increase after listing, and how do you balance consumers, merchants and the platform?

The earlier stages can't be skipped. The difficulties they ran into and the hardships they endured, we all have to endure too, but those who come after can at least see what methods they used to solve them, so relatively speaking it will be somewhat faster and the price paid somewhat smaller.

As a platform, the most important thing for us is to guarantee the fairness of the business environment. There can't be mechanism-level problems that leave you unable to punish good people while indulging bad people [Translator's note: so in the original, 让你不能惩罚好的人，纵容坏的人, "unable to punish good people, indulging bad people"; the sense may be "punishing good people and indulging bad people"]; we must avoid the situation of bad money driving out good.

**(Q)** Your users are mainly in third- and fourth-tier cities?

Our active users are 340 million, almost half of Alibaba's. Alibaba is a company with especially strong publicity ability, and it has done many things with great social influence. The great majority of Pinduoduo's users, as I see it, have actually been converted over. Pinduoduo has in effect created a new scenario, and then become the number-one company in that scenario.

Pinduoduo isn't the first company I've built; one of my earlier companies also listed. Pinduoduo was mostly luck; it isn't something a team could pull off by pure effort and pure experience alone. What you see today is a kind of unbelievable growth: explosive growth of users, explosive growth of merchants, even explosive growth of advertising revenue, all pushed by the general trend; by the strength of an individual and a small team alone it absolutely couldn't be done.

**(Q)** Liu Qiangdong (刘强东) says he cares about user experience and you'll see the gap after three purchases; your view?

Fundamentally I agree with Old Liu's statement [Translator's note: 老刘, "Old Liu", refers to Liu Qiangdong]: a business model in the end depends on consumer experience and on value for money. Everyone wants both substance and face, but when you can't have both, I think most ordinary consumers care first about substance.

As I see it, today most regions ought to get so-called fairness in consumption. China's advanced places are already very advanced, and its backward places are still very backward, which is why we're still fighting the battle against poverty; in between there's a very large group that needs to be brought closer to the advanced.

**(Q)** What role has Tencent played in Pinduoduo's development?

Before the C round Tencent had no shares in us. At that time our development was harder, and our dependence on WeChat and Tencent was also higher. This also shows that the business environment of Tencent's platform is still fairly fair. At that time Tencent had already invested in many e-commerce companies, and in that situation we didn't receive unfair treatment either.

After Tencent took its stake, we also don't seek fair treatment favorable to me. Now our volume keeps getting bigger and plays a more and more important role for WeChat Pay; the two companies have more areas of commercial cooperation, and the degree of mutual dependence will increase further.

**(Q)** Your customer acquisition costs are very high now?

The original acquisition model is still very good. Before the first half of 2017, roughly, our cost of acquiring customers was extremely low; we were basically a fraction of others'.

Why did it soar? A very important reason is the increase in advertising revenue. We're taking in a great deal of advertising revenue, and paying dividends at this stage of ours would be a bit odd, so you have to think about how to spend this extra money effectively on investment.

At the current stage, brand advertising is very worth our spending money on. Compared with Alibaba, our brand power is still weak, and consumers' recognition of us is still low. You have to invest in places with top IP; the Pinduoduo consumers see from friends and the Pinduoduo they see on CCTV and in the World Cup are not the same.

What we see is a long-term asset investment, but in the short term it doesn't help traffic, and it's booked into short-term advertising expenses. This is a limitation of accounting: it has no way of booking long-term intangible assets.

**(Q)** Is the advertising meant to win users in first- and second-tier cities?

Actually our users have always been fairly evenly spread. I think dividing into first-, second-, third- and fourth-tier cities is the traditional marketing thinking of the previous generation of companies like Procter & Gamble.

The same person can show an extreme two-sidedness. For example, a young mother in a city earning 6000 yuan a month may buy the most expensive diapers but buy the cheapest oatmeal for her husband. You can't pin a person down and say this person lives in a third-tier city, so you're a third-tier consumer.

**(Q)** Will other companies copy Pinduoduo's experience?

An exactly identical company would be quite hard. It's not that none have appeared; in our very first year there were several hundred to a thousand, but none of them succeeded. In the past we brought American models to China; now it may be copying Chinese models abroad.

Within WeChat's system, or in new social scenarios, and in scenarios of fragmented time, new business forms will emerge, and that business form may grow as big as Taobao.

With the spread of smartphones, the total time spent on phones is actually far higher than the total time once spent on computers. Now the battery you use on search is actually very little, perhaps less than 10%, but the WeChat app alone may take up 50% of your phone's battery use, and how many transactions has this product that takes up 50% of usage produced so far?

So I think new people will come along, but in some different forms; what exactly, I don't know either.

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