Chinese tech giants’ push into U.S., Europe’s markets sets up potential clash with Amazon
TikTok owner ByteDance has launched a women’s fashion website called If Yooou. Pinduoduo launched an e-commerce site in the U.S. called Temu. The two companies are the latest Chinese tech giants to look to crack the international e-commerce market domianted by Amazon.
Mike Kemp | In Pictures | Getty Images
Pinduoduo and TikTok owner ByteDance launched e-commerce websites overseas in the last few months, as they aim to take a crack at selling Chinese products to foreign buyers.
The move sets the two Chinese technology firms up on a collision path with Amazon as they expand internationally.
Pinduoduo, one of China’s biggest e-commerce companies, launched a U.S. shopping site called Temu last month, which sold products in categories from fashion to sports and electronics.
Weeks later, ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered owner of short video app TikTok, launched a fashion website named If Yooou. It is currently shipping to the U.K., Spain, Italy, Germany and France.
Both firms are looking to replicate the success of Shein, the Chinese fast fashion brand that is reportedly now worth $100 billion and has found a large customer base in the U.S. and elsewhere.
ByteDance and Pinduoduo are also relying on cross-border e-commerce — selling Chinese goods to overseas consumers. The U.S. and European markets also present an opportunity for growth.
The push abroad comes at a time where tech giants in China are looking for new avenues of growth as the domestic economy continues to face challenges as a result of Beijing’s strict Covid control policies and deteriorating global macroeconomic environment.
“I think ByteDance and [Pinduoduo] are seizing an opportunity to apply their unique social commerce innovations” to overseas markets, Jacob Cooke, CEO of WPIC, an e-commerce tech and marketing firm that helps foreign brands sell in China, told CNBC.
Pinduoduo declined to comment for this story, while ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.
Pinduoduo and ByteDance e-commerce strategy
Cross-border e-commerce strategies of Pinduoduo, also known as PDD, and ByteDance will be different given their different strengths.
In China, PDD has grown rapidly by building direct links with suppliers and offering big discounts. That could help when it comes to sourcing products to sell in the U.S. and selling them at low prices.
ByteDance, meanwhile, runs TikTok — one of the world’s most popular social media apps.
ByteDance’s algorithms for understanding consumers on Tiktok, “plus the potential to leverage the TikTok ecosystem for commerce, are massive advantages,” Cooke said.
The Chinese firm is not new to e-commerce abroad. In the U.K., it has a shopping feature in TikTok where brands and influencers make videos on products and users can buy those products via the app.
But it hasn’t found success yet.
[Pinduoduo and ByteDance] face low brand recognition and need to build user trust.
Jacob Cooke
CEO of WPIC
Dmonstudio, a women’s fashion site that ByteDance previously launched, shut down after just a few months in operation. And Fanno, another e-commerce site from ByteDance, hasn’t had much traction.
So-called livestream shopping is very popular in China and certain countries in Asia, but it hasn’t really taken off in Europe or the U.S. The Financial Times reported in July that TikTok has abandoned plans to expand its livestream e-commerce strategy in Europe and the U.S.
That could be a reason ByteDance has persisted with an e-commerce shopping website to accompany its TikTok shopping strategy.
ByteDance and Pinduodudo are newer Chinese firms looking to take on international markets. Alibaba and JD.com, China’s two largest e-commerce firms, have been expanding overseas in the last few years.
Amazon challenge?
ByteDance and Pinduoduo’s attempts to crack the e-commerce market put them in direct competition with U.S. giant Amazon.
PDD’s Temu, which sells products across different categories, will look to challenge Amazon in price.
ByteDance’s If Yooou website will compete with Amazon in fashion, an area the Seattle-headquartered firm has been looking to boost its efforts in.
But both could face a challenge dislodging the dominance of Amazon.
One reason is that consumer behavior outside of China tends to favor Amazon’s model, according to Cooke. Customers usually go to Amazon to find specific products or brands that they have already decided to buy, he said.
In contrast, Chinese platforms like Alibaba’s Tmall and JD.com “function more like virtual shopping malls where people are browsing and participating in a digital social experience.”
Pinduoduo and ByteDance “can eat away at Amazon’s share of certain sectors as Shein has done, but ultimately they won’t jeopardize Amazon’s stranglehold on the U.S. e-commerce market,” Cooke said.
“They face low brand recognition and need to build user trust.”
Technology
AppLovin stock tanks on report SEC is investigating company over data-collection practices
The AppLovin logo arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AppLovin shares plummeted on Monday after Bloomberg reported that the SEC has been probing the mobile advertising company over its data-collection practices.
The agency has been looking into whether the company violated agreements on pushing targeted ads to consumers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said that the SEC is responding to a whistleblower complained filed this year along with multiple short-seller reports, and added that neither the company nor its officials have been accused of wrongdoing.
An AppLovin spokesperson said the company doesn’t typically comment on the “existence or non-existence” of regulatory matters.
“That said, as a global public company, we regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.”
The stock dropped 14% in regular trading after the report, which landed shortly before market close. It fell another 5% in extended trading.
AppLovin’s stock has been on a tear, jumping about 80% this year after soaring more than 700% in 2024. The surge has been driven by the company’s artificial intelligence technology that’s allowed it to provide better ad targeting capabilities to brands.
Last month, AppLovin was added to the S&P 500, replacing MarketAxess Holdings, at the same time that Robinhood joined the index in place of Caesars Entertainment.
AppLovin made the move into the benchmark despite a short-seller’s effort to keep it out.
In March, Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500.
Three notable short-seller firms, including Fuzzy Panda, have slammed AppLovin of late. The latest was Muddy Waters Research, which in March said the company’s ad tactics “systematically” violate app stores’ terms of service by “impermissibly extracting proprietary IDs from Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Google, and others.” In so doing, AppLovin is funneling targeted ads to users without their consent, Muddy Waters said.
Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research put out reports the prior month, taking aim at AppLovin’s AXON software, which drove its earnings growth and stock surge. The shares dropped 12% on Feb. 26, the day of the short reports.
After those reports were published, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi wrote a blog post, defending his company’s technology and practices, and taking aim at the short sellers trying to profit from AppLovin’s decline.
Figma signage appears at the New York Stock Exchange in New York as the company prepares for its shares to begin trading on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Figma shares jumped 7% on Monday after the design software vendor’s technology was promoted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an onstage demo at his company’s annual DevDay conference in San Francisco.
Altman discussed Figma’s integration into ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million monthly users. He showed how third-party applications could plug in with OpenAI’s Apps SDK, or software development framework.
“When someone’s using ChatGPT, you’ll be able to find an app by asking for it by name,” Altman said. “For example, you could sketch out a product flow for ChatGPT and then say, Figma, turn this sketch into a workable diagram. The Figma app will take over respond and complete the action.”
In addition to asking for Figma’s help by name in ChatGPT, the assistant can also suggest Figma when it’s relevant, Figma product manager Luke Zhang said in a blog post.
The rally for Figma, at its high point, was the steepest since the day of the company’s public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange in July.
Figma has been ramping up its own tools for working on app and website designs using generative AI models from OpenAI and other providers.
Subscribers to products that connect to the Apps SDK will be able to log in without leaving their ChatGPT conversations, Altman said. He said people working on products in Figma can also launch the FigJam tool to keep working on development ideas. Apps SDK is based on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that OpenAI rival Anthropic introduced last year.
Software developers will be able to submit apps for review later in 2025, Altman said.
Over time, OpenAI will offer many ways to generate revenue through third-party integrations, Altman said. Last week, OpenAI announced a feature allowing people to buy products listed on Etsy through ChatGPT.
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