Love it or hate it, you have to admit Formerly had a great year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned e-commerce site, known for selling a wide range of items at surprisingly affordable prices, took just two years to become a household name in China. America. Over the past 12 months, it has topped the download charts, surpassing other viral apps like ChatGPT and topicand currently operates in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest rival, Amazon, recently introduced one I'm afraid of cloning called Amazon Haul is almost identical to the original, both in terms of supply chain logistics and user interface.
According to analysts AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, Temu is expected to earn total revenue of more than $50 billion this year, potentially tripling the 2023 figure. Temu website currently available nearly 700 million visits worldwide every month and Apple recently revealed that this is Most downloaded app of the year 2024 on iPhone in the US.
Temu has now completely replaced Wish, a former low-cost online shopping site, in the cultural lexicon as a signifier of knockoffs or budget-friendly alternatives. For example, the winner of a recent Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City, called himself “Ago-thée Chalamet.” Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, many of whom learned about it through one of Temu's relentless and seemingly inevitable advertising campaigns. At this time, your grandmother probably also obsessed with Temu.
“I have friends and family members who don't know what 2023 is like,” said Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online markets. “Random relatives who know that I study China or e-commerce will say, 'Oh, you must know all about Temu,' in a way that wouldn't have happened a year ago.”
Weigel says Temu did a few things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting the right customer segments and figuring out how to get products from one place to another efficiently. less expensive. That allowed the shopping platform to defy analysts' initial predictions that it would quickly burn through its cash reserves and flare up.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said Temu, owned by PDD, one of China's largest e-commerce giants, is moving and pivoting at speed. levels that Western partners cannot really grasp. “When you look at a company like Temu, you see it's moving at thousands of miles an hour,” he said.