Overwork in China – called the 996 culture – is rampant, especially in the IT industry. The recent death of a Pinduoduo employee also shocked social commentator Zhang Lijia. For her, this cannot be solved by the industry or employees, but the government should step in, she writes in the South China Morning Post.Read More →

The shock was all around when a worker at China’s leading IT firm Pinduoduo recently collapsed and died under the pressure of overwork. But despite the fierce reactions, IT analyst Matthew Brennan, author of Attention Factory: The Story of Tiktok and China’s Bytedance, does not expect the culture of overwork in China’s IT firms will disappear, he tells Vice.Read More →

China is home to four out of five largest unicorns – startups valued over one billion US dollars, second to the US, says the latest report by the Hurun Global Unicorn Index, published on Tuesday.  “The rest of the world needs to wake up to providing an ecosystem that allows unicorns to flourish,” says Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun report to the South China Morning Post.Read More →

While the jury is still out on the economic effects of the coronavirus crisis, the majority of the wealthy ended off better since the COVID-19 hit the world, says Hurun rich list founder Rupert Hoogewerf in the Business Standard. “The two biggest ‘winners’ from the Hurun Top 100 of Covid-19 were online retailers Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Colin Huang Zheng of Chinese low-end ‘social shopping’ giant Pinduoduo,” says Hoogewerf.Read More →

The successful IPO of Pinduoduo,  the third e-commerce platform in China after Alibaba and JD.com, took many by surprise. But it does not mean Pinduoduo will be equally successful in the future, warns business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order, at the South China Morning Post. Just days later, it was accused of hosting counterfeit goods.Read More →

For many outside China the successful IPO on Nasdaq of group purchasing platform Pinduoduo, mildly comparable to the less successful Groupon, came as a surprise. Shanghai-based business analyst Ben Cavender tries to explain the success at Inkstone. It uses the popular Tencent platforms WeChat and QQ.Read More →