Where Big Tech is challenged

In China, upstart technology companies are doing something that can feel impossible. They’re challenging the tech kings.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that a five-year-old Chinese e-commerce site, Pinduoduo, became the country’s most widely used shopping website. More people made purchases last year on Pinduoduo — which is a combination of Costco, a video game, QVC and Amazon — than shopped on Alibaba, China’s version of Amazon.

By the way, do you want to feel small and insignificant? Chinese shoppers spend more than $2 trillion each year on online purchases — and it’s nearing half of all retail sales in the country. Americans spent about $800 million on e-commerce in 2020, or about 14 percent of retail sales.

One of the big questions about technology is whether America’s current tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon will stay powerful forever. In China, the answer is maybe not. (But we’ll see.)

In the last few years ByteDance, the company that makes the Douyin app and its international version TikTok, has also challenged China’s all-powerful Tencent.

I don’t want to go overboard. Alibaba and Tencent remain supremely powerful, and it’s hard to imagine that changing. ByteDance and Pinduoduo could have trouble staying popular and making money. It’s also difficult to know if China is a glimpse at what could happen to tech powers elsewhere in the world. China is unusual.

But it is intriguing to see technology superpowers confronted with newcomers bringing fresh ideas.
The New York Times