Colin Juan (Colin Huang)

Colin Juan (Colin Huang)

Biography

2024: The richest man in China

The owner of the PDD Holdings group, which includes Temu and Pinduoduo marketplaces, Colin Huang has become the richest man in China. According to the Bloomberg billionaires index, his fortune as of August 9, 2024 is $48.6 billion.

It is noted that Huang pushed Zhong Shanshan, the creator and owner of the bottled water company Nongfu Spring, which was on the first line of the rating since April 2021, to second place. Shanshan's fortune is estimated at $47.3 billion. In the world ranking of the richest people Bloomberg Huang takes 25th position, and Shanshan - 26th.

Huang graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Zhejiang University. After graduation, he began his career at Google headquarters in 2004 as a software engineer and project manager. Then he moved to China, becoming part of the team that created Google China. Huang founded his first company in 2007, a Ouku.com e-commerce site that offered consumer electronics and mobile phones. He sold the project in 2010 and then founded the Leqi resource, which helped companies sell their services at sites such as Taobao and JD.com. He also worked for a gaming company that offered role-playing games through WeChat.

In 2015, Huang founded the e-commerce platform Pinduoduo. As noted by Bloomberg, Juan is one of the so-called covid billionaires, whose condition rose sharply at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. He quickly joined the ranks of the richest people in the world, and his net worth peaked at $71.5 billion in early 2021. However, Huang's fortunes then collapsed just as quickly, shrinking by 87% in about a year. But the entrepreneur was able to keep the business going, helped by expansion beyond China. As a result, 44-year-old Huang became the richest man in the PRC.^[1]

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