China’s new Internet king Colin Huang advances in mask

At 40, the billionaire from Shanghai is the founder of Pinduoduo, the star of e-commerce in 2020. The Financial Times investigated the network of applications and sites with opaque financial packages that he created.

Some kind of office tower in the heart of Shanghai. This is where wedding dresses are shipped to the United States, watches for the French market and inexpensive sneakers to the United Kingdom.

Dozens of apps and websites operate from the 23rd floor of the Greenland Tower, where staff work in perfectly neutral offices, save for Creed “self-confidence” repeated on all glass doors.

The stock jumped 261% in 2020

The man behind all these businesses is called Colin Zheng Huang. At 40, this Chinese billionaire is the founder, president and majority shareholder of one of the biggest successes of 2020 in online commerce: the Pinduoduo app, which has seen its share value increase by 261% since January 2020. .

In addition to the Pinduoduo site, today valued at 170 billion dollars [140,4 milliards d’euros], Colin Huang has created a vast network of e-commerce and online games companies entrusted to a small circle of relatives. Today he is the undisputed master of the Internet in Shanghai.

In the top 10 shopping apps in France

Some of his companies are more famous abroad than Pinduoduo. Vova, for example, is one of Europe’s most popular online sales services. According to figures from Sensor Tower, a traffic analysis company, Vova was among the top ten shopping apps in France and Italy in the [troisième] quarter 2020.

The platform of activities gathered in the Greenland Tower enabled Pinduoduo to recruit its first employees and helped the company to develop its sales and marketing services.

Pinduoduo first presented itself to investors as a company founded by Colin Huang, or at least linked to the billionaire through other companies. However, on the documents registered with the Chinese regulatory authorities only appear the names of some of its associates. Baptized bai shoutao, “White gloves”, the use of a nominee is a common practice in China: wealthy entrepreneurs ask friends or relatives to be the official holders of their business shares in order to limit their risks and avoid not draw too much attention to their activities.

In China, Colin Huang rarely owned shares in his own name. Even for Pinduoduo: just before the company’s IPO in 2018, he sold his shares to Chen Lei, CEO of Pinduoduo and former fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Serial entrepreneur”

Among those figureheads, a 69-year-old woman, from a rural area of ​​inland China known for its goji berries, owned 90% of several businesses started by Colin Huang – until the Financial Times asks questions about their identity.

Pinduoduo gives investors little information about its ties to all of these other companies.

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Ryan McMorrow