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If you shop online, you've likely noticed Temu, the fast-growing e-commerce marketplace. But the owner of Temu is a mystery to most Americans. Temu's parent company, PDD Holdings (NASDAQ:PDD), is one of China's largest e-commerce companies, and it's employed a similar playbook with Temu as it has with Pinduoduo, its primary business in China.
The competitor to Shein and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has grown rapidly by selling a wide range of bargain-priced goods in major international markets, like the U.S. It's advertised aggressively to build brand awareness and interest in its product assortment.
Temu was launched in September 2022, but its presence is already being felt by competitors, consumers, and even in the online advertising industry, where it's spent heavily on digital ads. Temu doesn't report revenue, but its traffic jumped by more than 700% in 2023, according to SimilarWeb, and its app passed TikTok as the most downloaded app in the U.S. in March 2023. In 2024, it became one of the 100 most visited websites globally.
PDD Holdings, the parent company of Pinduoduo, owns Temu. Pinduoduo is a Chinese e-commerce platform that has grown rapidly thanks to discount prices and a social commerce model similar to Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN).
Founded in 2015, Pinduoduo is younger than both Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) and JD.com (NASDAQ:JD), China's leading e-commerce companies. However, it has quickly gained market share, challenging the pair for e-commerce supremacy in the world's biggest online retail market.
PDD launched Temu in September 2022 in the United States, establishing a significant overseas presence for the first time. Since then, Temu has expanded to dozens of countries around Europe, Latin America, and Africa. As of July 2024, it was doing business in more than 79 countries.
Temu is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings, so there aren't direct shareholders in Temu. However, as a publicly traded company, PDD has a wide range of shareholders, including individual and institutional investors. Let's take a look at the top shareholders at PDD Holdings.
According to the company's annual report, only one individual was listed as a principal shareholder as of Feb. 29, 2024.
Zheng Huang, 1.41 billion shares, 25.4% ownership
Zheng Huang, also known as Colin Huang, is the co-founder and former CEO of PDD Holdings. Now a billionaire, Huang was part of the team that launched Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google in China. He also imagined Pinduoduo as a combination of Costco (NASDAQ:COST) and Walt Disney's (NYSE:DIS) Disneyland, a marketplace that offered not only bargain prices but also a fun experience.
After founding PDD in 2015, which was Pinduoduo at the time, and running it for five years, Huang stepped down as CEO in July 2020. He gave up his chairmanship the following year, leaving him no formal position in the company. He is now working on food and life sciences research, potentially building on Pinduoduo's innovation in food distribution.
PDD also says its group of nine directors and executive officers owns a combined 62.2 million shares of the stock, 1.1% of the shares outstanding.
Pinduoduo lists two institutional shareholders in its annual report, although third-party sites cite others. Below are the company's top five institutional shareholders.
Tencent, 783.5 million shares, 14.1% of shares outstanding
Chinese tech giant Tencent (OTC:TCEHY), best known as the parent of Chinese super app WeChat, is also a prolific investor, holding stakes in dozens of start-ups and publicly traded companies, including e-commerce companies like JD.com and Sea Limited (NYSE:SE). It's also a major investor in PDD Holdings and Temu.
PDD calls it a collaborator, too, saying it uses WeChat and WeChat Pay in its business. Tencent CEO Haifeng Lin has also been on the PDD board of directors since 2017. Tencent became a principal shareholder in PDD in 2017, prior to PDD's U.S. initial public offering (IPO) in 2018. PDD entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent in February 2018.
PDD Partners, 370.8 million shares, 6.7% of shares outstanding
PDD Partners is listed as an institutional shareholder in PDD Holdings. However, the entity is ultimately controlled by Colin Huang, the sole director of the two entities under which PDD Partners is a subsidiary. Its controlling entity is a limited liability holding company in the Virgin Islands.
Baillie Gifford, 34.8 million American depositary shares (ADS), 2.5% of shares outstanding
Bailie Gifford is an investment management firm based in Scotland and owns PDD in its worldwide long-term global growth fund.
BlackRock, 28.1 million ADS, 2% of shares outstanding
BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) is one of the world's largest investment managers, operating several exchange-traded funds (ETFs) under the iShares brand. It owns PDD Holdings, now one of the largest tech stocks in China, through both ETFs and mutual funds.
Vanguard Group, 24.3 million ADS, 1.8% of shares outstanding
Vanguard Group is another massive investment manager, owning shares of PDD in both its ETFs and mutual funds.
Temu doesn't have its own board of directors. As a subsidiary of PDD Holdings, PDD's board oversees Temu. PDD has six directors on its board and three principal executive officers who are not on the board:
You can't invest directly in Temu, but you can buy shares of PDD Holdings, its parent company, just like you would any other stock, as it's a publicly traded company.
Although PDD is a Chinese company, it's listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange under the stock ticker PDD. You can buy the stock from your brokerage platform by searching for that ticker and hitting the buy button.
It's worth noting that PDD doesn't currently break out Temu's results separately. Temu is thought to be significantly smaller than Pinduoduo, but it has contributed to PDD's strong growth rate since its launch. PDD's revenue more than doubled in Q4 2023 and accelerated in every quarter of 2023. It remained elevated in 2024 at 45% or better for each of the first three quarters.
As Temu grows, PDD may report more details about it, such as revenue, and investors will likely know whether Temu becomes profitable. PDD has been a winning stock for investors. Although you can't invest in only Temu as a pure play, investors interested in Temu shouldn't hesitate to buy PDD and also get exposure to Pinduoduo, which has seen soaring growth on the top and bottom lines.
*Average returns of all recommendations since inception. Cost basis and return based on previous market day close.
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