The market is looking for a new valuation coordinate system for Pinduoduo. In addition to revenue, the market does not understand Pinduoduo:

First of all, when new competitors such as Jikuai appeared in the market, why did Pinduoduo reduce its marketing expenses? In this quarter, Pinduoduo's marketing expenses were 65.438+000506 billion yuan, which was lower than the same period last year and decreased by 3% month-on-month.

Second, where has Pinduoduo invested heavily in agriculture? Has Pinduoduo found a future in agriculture? Chen Lei, Chairman and CEO of Pinduoduo, recently announced that all the profits of Pinduoduo this quarter will also be invested in "10 billion agricultural research projects".

The answer to the above question is actually similar: Pinduoduo is changing its growth strategy.

In the past few years, Pinduoduo has undergone several strategic transformations, such as tens of billions of subsidies, such as shifting the focus of tens of billions of subsidies from electronic products to daily necessities, but these strategic transformations are all carried out under the same proposition of the times, that is, there is still enough room for the market to be tapped.

However, from the bleak financial reports released by major Internet companies recently, we can see that the whole Internet industry is entering a stagflation period: Tencent's "net profit 10 has dropped for the first time in 0 years", Baidu has lost16.5 billion yuan, and ByteDance, which has not yet been listed, reported that Tik Tok stopped growing. Today, headlines are losing money, and the growth space of each company has become tense.

Pinduoduo, which has 867.3 million active buyers and 7,465,438+5,000 monthly active users, is also facing a similar situation. If we strive to maintain a high growth rate, Pinduoduo will have to pay a higher cost than before, and even high investment will be difficult to meet expectations in the case of a huge base and a lack of decent growth opportunities in the market.

"Pinduoduo's investment in marketing expenses has always adhered to a high standard of ROI (return on investment)." Chen Lei responded in a conference call. At the stage when the number of users on the platform is small, Pinduoduo aims to attract more users to participate in activities and enjoy services on the platform. Now the platform has a large number of users. How to provide users with more kinds of goods and better experiences, meet users' expectations and enhance users' trust in the platform has become a new challenge for Pinduoduo.

When the growth of platform users slows down, the growth of Pinduoduo depends on the growth of ARPU, which means that Pinduoduo must prove its core value to promote cross-consumption.

The core value of Pinduoduo's choice is agriculture. Many people don't understand why Pinduoduo has to invest so much in agriculture.

Chen Lei's response on the conference call may help us to understand this problem. "Pinduoduo started with agricultural products, and it can better meet the daily basic needs of users. We hope to provide users with goods and services such as rice, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar tea, which is different from other e-commerce. "