The biggest change when Huang Zheng resigned seems to be the loss of his false reputation and his disappearance from the list of the company's board of directors.

That's all.

At the pinduoduo performance report meeting on March 17, the company announced that Huang Zheng would step down as chairman. At the same time, Huang Zheng relinquished his 1:10 overvoting rights and handed over about 28.9 per cent of his ordinary voting rights to the board of directors for collective decision-making.

He was replaced by pinduoduo's current CEO, Chen Lei, 41 (the same age as Huang Zheng). He has been pinduoduo's CTO since 2016, joined the board a year later, and took over as CEO from Huang Zheng in July 2020. The two, who have known each other for many years, are former classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied under the same mentor and co-authored at least three papers.

The decision to retire from office was made a long time ago. Huang Zheng said in a letter to shareholders that he had planned to complete the handover of chairman with Chen Lei during the full year of the handover of CEO (July 1 this year), but the decision was implemented ahead of time because of the fierce and even gradually distorted competitive environment in the industry and the greatly changed external macro environment.

Two people close to Pinduoduo said the company was not surprised by Huang Zheng's resignation. Because before this, he has expressed the idea that he will no longer serve as chairman on a small scale.

The resignation of the founder does not mean retirement. Today's enterprises are facing a complex living environment, especially large enterprises. Entrepreneurs are bound to bring many benefits, including security, from front to behind the scenes.

In this context, there is little point in debating whether entrepreneurs really retire, because retirement has always been a false proposition. The key is who will control the company and who will control it for a long time.

As part of the plan, Huang Zheng's pinduoduo stock will remain locked up for three years and will not be sold. This not only calms the market, but also ensures that he is still the largest shareholder of the company during this period-even if he loses his overvoting rights, Huang Zheng still has the highest control of the company.

According to pinduoduo's prospectus on convertible bonds and new shares issued in November last year, Huang Zheng holds 28.9 per cent of pinduoduo's shares but has 80.3 per cent voting rights after the new financing is completed. The excess will expire after retirement, with 28.9% of the voting rights, but still more than the voting rights of all other shareholders combined. And only Huang Zheng holds super voting shares in pinduoduo.

After Huang Zheng, equity and voting rights are as follows:

Tencent, 16.0% equity, 4.4% voting rights

Banyan Capital, 7.6% equity, 2.1% voting rights

Pinduoduo partner entity, 7.6% equity, 2.1% voting rights

Sequoia, 6.9% equity, 1.9% voting rights

Shen Nanpeng has an equity stake of 3.9% and a voting right of 1.1%.

When pinduoduo stepped down as CEO on July 1 last year and retained the title of chairman, Huang Zheng said he would study and improve the corporate governance structure, including the partnership mechanism, and strive to push pinduoduo to a higher level at the institutional level. It is speculated that, like Jack Ma, he will use the partnership system to ensure his control over the company after retirement.

But Huang Zheng is extremely confident. He decided many years ago that once a new species like pinduoduo passed the safe period, it would be bigger than Ali. Now he continues to maintain control of the company in a way that transcends Ali but is extremely austere. He can restore nominal command whenever he wishes.

The decision on how to view Huang Zheng depends on his position. Many secondary market analysts are less concerned about when the business of buying more vegetables, which the company sees as a long-term plan, will turn a profit.

The board may not mind whether Huang Zheng really retires-after all, who would reject a founder who can bring huge growth to the company? As long as the interests of both sides are in the same direction, there will be no problem-just like the relationship between son and Jack Ma after the dispute over the privatisation of Alipay.

Within the company, several current pinduoduo employees told LatePost later that they were not surprised. Because they are no longer aware of Huang Zheng in their daily work, they end up reporting to either CEO Chen Lei or COO Abramovich (Gu Yingyi), or accept two-line leadership.

"Abramovich is everywhere," said pinduoduo, who has a daily business encounter with two senior executives. As for the status of these two people in the minds of employees, in the words of the employee, if Abramovich questions a certain business, they will "come up with all the options that they think are feasible"; and if it is Chen Lei-ti, they will also change it. But "the change is done."

Abramovich, a sister of Zhejiang University in the fourth year of Xiao Huang Zheng, began her internship in Ouku Company founded by Huang Zheng in 2007, participated in the development of e-commerce recommendation system, and then took the project as the research subject of her master's degree thesis. She mentioned Huang Zheng in the thank-you section of her paper. "thanks to my friends. Thank you for your help in my life and study. Thanks to Huang Zheng, Yang Xiao and Sun Wenli. "

Having known each other for many years, Abramovich has always been one of Huang Zheng's most trusted people. This kind of trust was put to the maximum in pinduoduo. Abramovich's reward is a high degree of understanding and strong execution. One former employee said that Abramovich is half a person-half himself, half Huang Zheng.

Alibaba also had an employee post on the intranet yesterday to discuss Huang Zheng's retirement, but since 7 o'clock yesterday, there has been only one new post, with a total of about 25,000 clicks, a total of 6 pages, and about 100 responses per page, which is quite hot.

The discussion mainly focused on the relationship between the fall in pinduoduo's share price and Huang Zheng's retirement, as well as the comparison of the number of daily active users. "people are mainly focused on stock prices and business discussions," one Alibaba employee told LatePost later.

It may be because pinduoduo has only business that can be discussed by the public in a relatively transparent manner.

In fact, everyone wants to know more about this young company. But this is a closed kingdom where employees are not encouraged to communicate with the outside world and are found to be fired; the management pushed out for publicity does not really belong to the core circle of the company internally-with the exception of Chen Lei. The company is like an isolated island that takes the initiative to stay away, living in two worlds with the outside world.

Closure and high-pressure management allowed the kingdom to operate as efficiently as a machine. As summed up by an immediate community user who claimed to be a former employee of pinduoduo, pinduoduo is an efficiency machine with a strong engine, which is highly centralized, highly flat, strict in and out, eliminated at the end, and controlled in scale. The will of the leadership will be carried out at the fastest speed without deformation from the top down, and its organizational efficiency is second to none of the domestic Internet companies.

This has enabled pinduoduo to find a large market neglected by the giants between Ali and JD.com, with the help of pervasive operator infrastructure, smartphones, logistics networks, mobile payments and key Wechat traffic. rise and grow rapidly, until now it has reached the peak in stages. It also makes more people pay attention to the company's lack of humanistic care.

In the kingdom of pinduoduo, employees are required to strictly adhere to the values of "duty". Most of them think of themselves as a part of an efficient machine, only responsible for carrying out tasks-and it is not surprising why people keep teasing Huang Zheng these days that he may be resigned and competed for employment by pinduoduo's HR card.

To make fun of is to make fun of. Huang Zheng is free to come and go.

In fact,According to the information learned by later LatePost, Huang Zheng is still managing the company and setting strategies after leaving CEO, which directly affects pinduoduo's investment in buying more vegetables.

In 2019, Abramovich, as the head of Duoduo Buy, hesitated for 1-2 months, not thinking clearly whether to go all out in the shopping business, while Huang Zheng insisted on going all out. He turned the company's fifth anniversary (2020) into a pep rally to buy more food, calling on employees to "blow up the tip of the pyramid and not let the elderly lie on the merit book." It is necessary to open the mode of hard-core struggle. Those who do not work hard should be eliminated, the more bitter the more tired is to test a person's touchstone. "

After that speech, Abramovich and Chen Lei no longer hesitated to buy more food.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Duoduo contributed about 1 per cent of pinduoduo's sales. By the end of February this year, Duoduo had sold an average of about 15 million items a day, worth 75 million yuan, and its unit volume had approached Didi, which started months earlier, or 75 per cent of Meituan, in only half a year.

With the further development of the business, pinduoduo changed his weight again from a third-party platform with light assets, and began a new round of investment in warehousing, logistics and supply of goods. It is hard to believe that Huang Zheng will let go completely at this important node. In this regard, he himself has some reservations in his letter to shareholders:

"although pinduoduo himself is still very young, has a very thick and long snowy slope, and still has room for rapid growth for a long time, if we want to ensure its high-speed and high-quality development in 10 years' time, then some explorations are now the right time. As a founder, I jumped out to touch the stone on the road ten years later, which may be a more suitable candidate. "

Internally, the number of pinduoduo employees has long exceeded 6, 000. As a result of re-involvement in asset-heavy business, self-built supply chain and logistics system, the number of people will grow further rapidly, and the difficulty of company management will increase exponentially.

Externally, the community group-buying business, which is becoming more and more "heavy", is subject to both government supervision and competitive pressure from peers. Earlier this month, pinduoduo and four other community group buying platforms received fines from the State Administration of Market Supervision for excessive subsidies since the second half of last year. Regulators believe that the actions of the platforms have disturbed the market order.

But this is a business where there is no turning back.After the number of buyers exceeds Alibaba, pinduoduo's next phase of growth will focus on further improving user stickiness, making more orders on and off the platform and achieving higher turnover. Community group buying is undoubtedly one of the best breakthroughs.

On the one hand, the community group purchase, which is mainly composed of fresh fruits, oil, salt, vinegar, snacks and beverages, and household care, is relatively the easiest to make standard products while maintaining high consumption frequency-- this is also one of the core logic of JD.com 's shift to daily chemical products after the 3C category growth is limited.

On the other hand, the business model of community group buying to streamline commodity categories is also in line with pinduoduo's original competitive advantage: it has more categories than "omnipotent Taobao", fresh e-commerce with "one-hour delivery", or traditional e-commerce with half-day and alternate-day delivery. but in the end, we can gain a greater cost advantage by controlling local investment or even sacrificing part of the consumer experience. Rely on fewer commodity categories to achieve high sales, give full play to the bilateral scale effect of platform e-commerce.

Internet giants, small and medium-sized, who are experiencing growth problems or need new growth points, are also aware of the value of community group buying, which is one step further than traditional retail and one step behind traditional e-commerce. This also explains why everyone pours a lot of money into the arena in a short period of time.

This summer, the industry competition pattern may face a big reshuffle. As the temperature rises, the loss rate of fresh goods will increase significantly, and the requirements on the supply chain will be more stringent. To this end, various companies are currently focusing on improving the supply chain, and the business focus has shifted from speed to distribution efficiency, site efficiency, commodity diversity and other indicators.

Is this one of the stones he said in his letter to touch for the company? Will he come back when he touches it? What if it's a bigger rock? He didn't say it before, and no one made it clear in the future.