The capture of Temu is now complete

Love it or hate it, you have to admit it before it was a year. Launched in late 2022, it took just two years for the Chinese-owned e-commerce site, known for selling a wide variety of goods at amazingly reasonable prices, to become popular in the US. Over the past 12 months, it has topped the download charts, surpassing ChatGPT and other malware. Topicsand currently operates in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest competitor, Amazon, recently a I’m afraid of the clone called Amazon Haul, which is very similar to the original in terms of both logistics supply chain and user interface.

According to analysts AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, Temu will generate more than $50 billion in total sales this year, potentially tripling the 2023 figure. Temu’s website is now available about 700 million visits every month worldwide and Apple recently announced most loaded 2024 app on iPhones in the US.

Temu has now completely replaced the old bargain online shopping site Wish in the cultural lexicon, or as a symbol of budget-friendly alternatives. For example, the winner of a recent Timothée Chalamet similar contest in New York called himself “Ago-thee Chalamet.” Tens of millions of ordinary people tried the program, many of whom learned about it through one of Temu’s seemingly inescapable and relentless advertising campaigns. At this point, your grandmother probably also obsessed with Temu.

“My friends and family members who don’t know what’s going on in 2023 do now,” says Moira Weigel, an associate professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online markets. “Random relatives who know I’m studying China or e-commerce will say, ‘Oh, you should know all about Temu,’ in a way that didn’t happen a year ago.

Weigel says Temu did several things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting the right customer segments and finding a cheap way to ship products from one to the other. This allowed the trading platform to defy analysts’ predictions that it would quickly burn through cash reserves and catch fire.

Owned by PDD, one of China’s biggest e-commerce giants, Temu moves and spins at a pace that its Western counterparts can’t really grasp, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. “When you look at a company like Temu, it’s going a thousand miles an hour,” he says.