Jinghua is just a layout for the future. For Zhou Yujie, he only needs to invest money. The subsequent actual operation is naturally handed over to a professional team. Next, the entire Toutiao system will face a major event - Pinduoduo is about to be launched.

As the fastest-growing and most influential Pinduoduo under the Toutiao system, it has attracted the attention of capital since its inception. The characteristics of Pinduoduo itself have made hundreds of millions of ordinary people pay attention to this e-commerce platform that can provide high-quality, cost-effective products.

It has been less than three years since its birth to its current preparations for listing, but within just three years, Pinduoduo has hundreds of millions of users, with an annual transaction volume of tens of billions and a valuation of more than US$20 billion. In the entire country, it is second only to Taobao and JD in the e-commerce field.

The market that Pinduoduo chose to go public this time was not in the Nasdaq in the United States, but in Hong Kong. This made countless people curious, and also made the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission very happy.

Since the return of 1997, due to the Asian economic crisis, a large number of domestic state-owned enterprises have chosen to go public in Hong Kong, and many state-owned enterprises have also become blue-chip stocks in Hong Kong. However, the number of well-known domestic state-owned enterprises is limited, and only a small part of them can come to Hong Kong. After the listing of state-owned enterprises, the entire Hong Kong market has once again fallen into a dark horse without any dark horses.

Because the consortium has taken shape within Hong Kong, the ten major families monopolize everything, and the housing prices have risen, almost cutting off any opportunity for ordinary people to start a business, let alone successfully listing. The outside world is mainly some domestic private enterprises, but the scale is not large, and they are in the same direction as the real estate industry.

There are also some technology stocks, such as Tengxun and Kingsoft, but when these two companies were listed, the scale was actually very average and there was no limelight. In the future, Tengxun rose to become one of the blue chips in the Hong Kong stock market, but this one is the only one.

In fact, with Hong Kong's international financial status, although it is not as popular as the Nasdaq, which is more popular among Internet companies, it does not mean that it cannot guide domestic Internet or technology giants at all. There is an important reason, that is, Hong Kong does not recognize A-shares.

The root cause can be traced back to the China-UK capital war in the 1980s, but the long-term conservative strategy also led to Hong Kong's failure to obtain several domestic Internet giants with a market value of one trillion yuan. This was not until April 2018 when the Hong Kong government announced new listing rules that allowed the existence of A-shares.

In the original history, it was also because of this change that Alibaba and JD.com went public in Hong Kong for a second time, while Meituan chose to list separately in Hong Kong. Since then, all Internet giants worth nearly HK$10 trillion have been included in the Hong Kong stock market.

Now, Hong Kong stocks, which are not welcomed by Internet giants, have also welcomed Pinduoduo's listing, which is naturally very popular. The Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission has specially arranged a large-scale banquet to entertain Pinduoduo's senior executives and many investors.

"Mr. Shen, it's been a long time since we met." Zhang Lei was originally chatting and laughing with some senior executives in Pinduoduo. He suddenly saw Shen Nanpeng and immediately came over to greet him with a smile.

Shen Nanpeng also smiled and raised his glass to return and said, "Yes, it's almost a year. Are there any good new investment projects recently?"

Sequoia Capital [Huaguo] and Hillhouse Capital are both the most famous Internet technology investors in China. Both have successfully invested in a large number of high-quality companies, but the two companies do not have a competitive relationship because venture capital companies do not like to eat alone. They prefer to form cliques. Even if they encounter high-quality companies, they will not invest separately, because any venture capital will guide more capital into the company they invest in, and with the help of many resources, they will make the company bigger and ultimately make all profits.

However, there are special circumstances, that is, when the view is different, there may be only one company investing. For example, when JD.com decided to build its own logistics, it scared away 99.9% of investors. Only Zhang Lei of Hillhouse Capital invested 300 million US dollars, and Sequoia missed this opportunity. Similarly, even Hillhouse would miss other opportunities. On the contrary, there are more cases of failure.

Therefore, when top senior executives like them meet, it is very important to exchange information with each other, which helps them to more accurately analyze the development of new industries and new companies on the market.

Zhang Lei said with a smile: "No project can compare to Pinduoduo."

"This is true. Mr. Zhang has the vision. He will invest in Pinduoduo earlier. The current return rate may exceed dozens of times." Chen Nanpeng raised his glass and said.

Zhang Lei smiled and said, "Mr. Chen, don't sarcasticize me. Although I invested a little earlier, the total amount is not large. How can I compare to Sequoia Capital?"

Hillhouse Capital caught up with Pinduoduo's first financing, but it was a follow-up investment, with a terrible return rate, but the investment amount was not high and the upper limit was limited. Sequoia Capital once led the investment, and in terms of profit, Sequoia still made more profits.

Chen Nanpeng said: "We also paid a considerable price to obtain the qualification to enter the market."

Zhang Lei nodded and said, "Of course, if you want to invest in the current headlines, the price is a must."

The industries under Toutiao are strong, and the weak are at least one of the strongest in the industry. Even if Toutiao’s current businesses are separated and seven or eight companies are formed, three or four will become new Internet giants.

Such successful achievements naturally make Toutiao's new business value soar. Even giants like Sequoia Capital are not easy to participate in financing, because Zhou Yujie is now more inclined to raise funds with state-owned enterprises with strong backgrounds.

Chen Nanpeng looked around and asked in a low voice: "Mr. Zhang, have you heard of whether TikTok will introduce investors?"

"No." Zhang Lei also replied seriously.

The development speed of Douyin can be said to be the fastest APP in the Internet industry, and it appeared later than Pinduoduo. In addition, the entire Toutiao resource was piled up with Pinduoduo at that time, and Douyin, which has been silent, was ignored by most people.

It was not until the second half of last year that various data on Douyin began to grow explosively, which attracted the attention of capital. Because behind it was the headlines, no one would foolishly ask if Douyin was going to introduce an angel round or a round of financing.

Based on past experience, the core products of the Toutiao series generally have developed to an extremely high market share, and venture capital will be introduced only when encountering bottlenecks.

But obviously, Douyin is different from other products because it has almost no competitors. You should know that Quxin has QQ, Quxin Payment has Alipay, Today's Preferred has Meituan, Pinduoduo has Taobao and JD.com, and even the most relaxing Toutiao, there have been portals such as Tengxun News and Sina.

In the short video field where Douyin is located, there is only Kuaishou, a competitor of some size, but the target groups and business models of the two are completely different. The existence of Kuaishou will not affect the development of Douyin at all.

When it was the Spring Festival, Toutiao spent 5 billion to push Douyin, and everyone came to their senses. But obviously, Douyin has become a new behemoth because its retention rate is so high that almost half of the users attracted by the Spring Festival activities have been retained.

This number is already a miracle for Internet companies.
Chapter completed!