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The richest man has changed.

Three years later, Huang Zheng replaced Zhong Shanshan as the new richest man.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the 44-year-old Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng surpassed "China's Bottled Water King" Zhong Shanshan with a net worth of US$48.6 billion, becoming China's richest man. It is reported that Zhong Shanshan's net worth is currently US$47.4 billion. Based on this conversion, Huang Zheng's net worth is about 348.6 billion yuan.

This time, Huang Zheng surpassed Zhong Shanshan with a slight advantage, sending out a signal.

According to Hurun's 2024 Global Rich List, Zhong Shanshan ranked 21st in the world with a net worth of 450 billion. In other words, Zhong Shanshan's wealth has shrunk to a certain extent this year.

As we all know, Zhong Shanshan's wealth is mainly composed of two listed companies and some non-listed companies, among which Nongfu Spring and Wantai Biological are the main components of his wealth. According to relevant data, Nongfu Spring fell by more than 30% in 2024, and Wantai Biological also fell by more than 10%.

This also explains why Zhong Shanshan was surpassed by Huang Zheng.

On the other hand, Pinduoduo has been favored by the market and consumers since 2022 due to its low-price strategy. Its stock price rose by nearly 40% in 2022 and by more than 79% in 2023. Although it fell slightly by 5.67% in 2024, compared with the decline of Nongfu Spring, Pinduoduo's decline was not much.

It is worth noting that Huang Zheng is not a new face. As the founder of Pinduoduo, the reason behind Huang Zheng surpassing Zhong Shanshan is actually the change in market trends.

As we all know, the changes in the richest people are the changes in the market.

Huang Zheng stepped down as CEO of Pinduoduo in 2020 and resigned from Pinduoduo's board of directors in 2021. Since then, he has been very low-key and rarely appeared in public, but most of his wealth comes from his holdings in Pinduoduo.

In 2021, Huang Zheng's personal net worth was as high as US$71.5 billion, or about RMB 513.1 billion. In the past two years, with the changes in the market, his wealth has shrunk slightly, but compared with other Internet companies, Pinduoduo is in a relatively good situation.

At present, the Internet market is undergoing a new round of reshuffle. Pinduoduo's market value has not only surpassed JD.com, but also surpassed the previous e-commerce leader Alibaba. Behind this surpassing is the huge explosion in Pinduoduo's performance.

With its low-price model and refund-only model, Pinduoduo's revenue in the first quarter of this year reached 86.812 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 130.66%; its net profit attributable to the parent company was 27.998 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 245.61%. In the current market environment, it can still maintain such a high growth rate, which shows the success of Pinduoduo's model.

However, we need to be aware that the refund-only model also has major drawbacks. For the merchant group, this model is unsustainable, and platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com have already made corrections to this model.

Kanjian Finance believes that as an e-commerce platform, low prices are not the antidote for the industry. Although they have solved the growth problem of e-commerce in stages, in the long run, the sustainability is not sufficient. Although Pinduoduo has maintained a high growth rate since 2023, due to problems with the model, this performance growth brought about by low prices will eventually encounter bottlenecks. This is a problem that Pinduoduo needs to consider in the future.

Overall, we believe that Huang Zheng surpassing Zhong Shanshan is a positive signal for the Internet industry, and with the arrival of the interest rate cut cycle, Internet companies will also enter a new stage.