When the Internet giants are collectively burning money to invest in AI, Pinduoduo, which has a cash flow of 436.1 billion on its account, has chosen to invest heavily in brand self-operated business, Xinpinmu.
Xinpinmu, which initially targeted the European and American markets, is inseparable from the Temu business.
Data shows that as of May 2026, Temu ranked second among global e-commerce websites with 1.34 billion monthly visits and 366 million unique visitors from December 2025 to February 2026, second only to Amazon.
On the other side of the ocean, Temu took three years to complete Pinduoduo’s ten-year journey in China, but it also encountered unprecedented challenges. Due to complex external reasons such as the tax exemption policy for small packages, Temu was also one of the key factors that caused Pinduoduo’s turbulent performance in 2025. It even ushered in “the first annual profit decline since listing” in the annual report.
On May 27, Pinduoduo released its 2026 Q1 financial report, which showed that revenue was 106.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 11%; net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders was 12.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 15%. After the financial report was released, Pinduoduo’s US stock price fell nearly 6% before the market opened, at $91 per share.
When the pure “low-price white label” model reaches its ceiling in the global market, cross-border e-commerce will also usher in new changes with the implementation of Xinpinmu.
In the 60th day of the new Temu, small sellers have also received invitations
“Is it necessary to sign?” Recently, some Temu sellers have asked this question.
Starting from April this year, after Pinduoduo officially announced the launch of Xinpinmu, a “Comprehensive Foreign Trade Service Agreement” popped up in the backend of sellers including clothing, home furnishings, and department stores, and the signing party was “Xinpinmu Pudong E-Commerce Co., Ltd.”
This is one of the two new Pinmu special companies registered by Pinduoduo, with a registered capital of 5 billion yuan.
The other company is called Shanghai Xinpinmu Hongqiao E-Commerce Co., Ltd., with a registered capital of 10 billion yuan.
The legal representatives of both companies are Zhao Jiazhen, who has just served as co-chairman of Pinduoduo for nearly half a year.
Zhang Yue, a Temu fully-managed seller in the department store category, said that there were no dedicated investment recruiters to discuss the agreement and that she was not interested. In terms of sales volume, she could not be called a big cross-border seller. Perhaps because the stores basically received five-star reviews and the overall return rate was within 0.5%, she was within the scope of this invitation.
Many Temu sellers said that if they skip signing this agreement, they will still receive it every day when they open the backend.
The first thing Zhang Yue noticed was the liquidated damages. Article 9.1 of the agreement mentioned that if the seller “violates any agreement, commitment, guarantee, obligation or responsibility in these intellectual property terms, one of the breach of contract measures that needs to be taken is to pay 1 million liquidated damages.”
In addition to high liquidated damages, some sellers are hesitant because of the risks Xieyili needs to bear.
Another Temu seller said that after much deliberation, she still didn’t sign because she could at least control her own operations. If she signed this agreement, her concerns would be the long payment period, high deductions, warehouse management fees, and high deposits. If Xinpinmu does not receive sufficient traffic in the future, in her opinion, these agreements will be detrimental to sellers.
Another Temu seller who runs home furnishings and department stores said that he finally chose to sign the contract.
On the one hand, in Temu’s past agreements, the risks that sellers need to bear are not small. Unless the store is closed, if they continue to operate in Temu, they will eventually sign a contract.
On the other hand, his order volume on the Temu platform continues to decline. “2024 is the best year for sales on Temu, with thousands of orders per day. Last year, there were hundreds of orders per day. This year, there are only about a hundred orders per day.”
As one of the strategic implementation measures of Xinpinmu, at present, the core content of this agreement is to provide export agency, customs declaration, logistics, foreign exchange collection, settlement and other services for merchants, and to build a more deterministic infrastructure on the cross-border e-commerce link. Correspondingly, sellers also need to bear more risks.
At the same time, the progress of “Xinpinmu”, a self-operated brand that directly customizes products, buys out inventory, and is responsible for underwriting, has also attracted more attention. Pinduoduo is expected to be launched in the U.S. and European markets in the third quarter of 2026, and domestic sales will not be involved for the time being.
Many sellers who signed the “Comprehensive Foreign Trade Service Agreement” said that they have not yet received any further progress on the self-operation related agreements.
In the view of the above-mentioned sellers, with the launch of Xinpinmu’s self-operated brands, those trade sellers with no factories and no supply of goods in the past will definitely be the first to be shuffled. Small and medium-sized sellers in categories such as department stores and home furnishings like him, whose business categories coincide with the direction of Xinpinmu’s self-operated brands, will also worry about how the platform will balance the traffic between self-operated brands and third-party sellers, and will eventually choose to be included or eliminated.
Moreover, factories with large production capacity can reduce costs by relying on scale. Will the intrusion of low prices in these tracks intensify in the future?
Ma Kaiyue, who has participated in investment promotion work for multiple cross-border e-commerce platforms, said that within Pinduoduo, the new Pinmu self-operated brand is targeting Sam, that is, focusing on a limited number of SKUs to create explosive products.
Sam’s has about 4,000 SKUs, and selects popular items in each category. “New Pinmu” uses big data to select products, and only retains a few extreme items in each category.
At first, Xinpinmu looked for strong foreign trade OEMs, and later adopted a screening model of “easy entry and strict exit” from Temu’s backend.
Standing at the crossroads of a performance turning point
Before the launch of New Pinmu, Pinduoduo made a major adjustment in its organizational structure.
At the end of 2025, Pinduoduo announced the formal implementation of the co-chairman system at the shareholders’ meeting. Zhao Jiazhen was appointed as co-chairman, and he and Chen Lei served as co-chairman and co-CEO of the group. This marked the first time that Pinduoduo had a governance structure in which two “number one positions” coexisted.
According to reports, Zhao Jiazhen is clearly responsible for supply chain management and China business operations at Pinduoduo, and is the leader of core projects such as “New Pinmu”.
In his past resume, Zhao Jiazhen was mainly responsible for the overall operation of agricultural categories and the construction of the upstream supply chain of agricultural products in his early days at Pinduoduo, laying a solid foundation for the platform’s agricultural products business. He also took the lead in creating Duoduo’s grocery shopping business, led a team to promote Pinduoduo’s supply chain system, and participated in Temu’s U.S. investment promotion.
Behind the launch of “New Pinmu”, Pinduoduo’s performance is also at a crossroads.
In Pinduoduo’s financial report, Temu’s revenue is consolidated and included under the heading of “transaction service revenue”.
The financial report shows that from Q1 to Q4 of 2025, Pinduoduo’s transaction service revenue was 46.95 billion yuan, 48.28 billion yuan, 54.93 billion yuan and 63.902 billion yuan respectively, with year-on-year growth rates of 6%, 0.7%, 10% and 19% respectively.
In Q1 of 2026, Pinduoduo’s transaction service revenue was 56.293 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth of 20%.
This changing trend is also consistent with Temu’s global market situation in 2025.
In the first half of 2025, Temu accelerated its transformation to a “semi-managed + local delivery” model. In May, the U.S. market officially canceled the tax-free policy for Chinese imported packages worth less than US$800 (i.e., the T86 customs clearance model), causing cross-border e-commerce platforms represented by Temu to continue to soar in costs such as tariffs, customs declarations, compliance, overseas warehouses, and inventory costs.
In the second half of the year, as the mode switch was gradually completed, the growth rate rebounded. However, in 2025, the 9% growth rate of Pinduoduo’s “online transaction service revenue” for the whole year was still far lower than the high growth level of Pinduoduo’s overall revenue in the past. Temu’s “increasing revenue without increasing profits” has also become one of the important reasons for the decline in the company’s net profit in 2025.
As for the progress of Xinpinmu, in the Q1 financial report conference call, Zhao Jiazhen said that he hopes to integrate platform resources to deeply participate in product research and development and standard formulation, and promote a new model of brand self-operation.
At the same time, Pinduoduo hopes to share risks and rewards with supply chain manufacturers to provide certainty for participants in the ecosystem.
Zhao Jiazhen said that many small and medium-sized manufacturing companies have indeed done extremely well in terms of mass production delivery and cost control, but they lack branding capabilities. By setting up special companies, Pinduoduo hopes to deeply integrate the technical scale and organizational capabilities of the platform and make up for the shortcomings of branding in the industry chain by strengthening the construction of underlying capabilities.
Regarding the future development of Temu, during the financial report conference call, Chen Lei also emphasized the importance of brand self-operation construction. Chen Lei said that in the future, the brand self-operation model will be further developed, especially in the global market through branding construction, to enhance consumers’ awareness of high-quality and low-price platform products.
Currently, Pinduoduo is cooperating in depth with the manufacturing side to design and develop self-operated brand products for different markets around the world.
Judging from the current implementation situation, “Xinpinmu”, on the one hand, has reshaped the cross-border e-commerce supply chain through its status as a “comprehensive foreign trade agency service”.
On the other hand, Pinduoduo is also completing the role transformation from platform to brand, creating new Pinduoduo self-operated products, and selling products with higher unit price per customer and higher gross profit in the global market to achieve more certain growth.
Self-operated brands are in a fierce battle, and cross-border e-commerce is changing
The European and American markets are also Temu’s main battlefield. Its main competitors include SHEIN and Amazon. They all have self-operated brand businesses, but their paths and gameplay are fundamentally different from those of New Pinmu.
Amazon has aggressively launched Amazon Basic and other brands. Amazon Basics focuses on basic categories with large sales and low brand loyalty, such as batteries, data cables, printing paper, etc. The pricing is usually 20-40% lower than famous brand products, but until today it only accounts for 1% of platform sales.
Furthermore, in the past, a long-standing focus of dispute between Amazon and third-party sellers included the platform’s “acting as both a referee and an athlete.” Some third-party sellers believed that Amazon used its power as a platform operator to place self-operated products in a more favorable position in search results, engage in “self-preferential treatment,” use third-party seller data to develop “copycat” products, and so on.
Similarly, with the launch of new Temu, some small and medium-sized Temu sellers have the same worries.
SHEIN is expanding from its own brand to a platform model, but it takes advantage of supply chain efficiency, extremely fast response and extremely low cost control. Temu is good at supply chain integration. Xinpinmu’s underlying logic is based on its strong data capabilities and deep integration of China’s supply chain. It upgrades white-label factories to brands and earns brand premiums, trying to find a third path from “platform to brand”.
As the two major representatives of cross-border overseas enterprises, SHEIN has a fast fashion brand mentality, and Temu is making up for the brand’s shortcomings. Xinpinmu’s self-operated clothing category is also the category that SHEIN is best at.
This also means that the competition among cross-border e-commerce companies is evolving from a traffic and price war to a brand war that tests internal strength.
