The Temu acquisition is now complete

Love it or hate it, you have to admit Timo He had a banger year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned e-commerce site, known for selling a wide range of goods at surprisingly affordable prices, took just two years to become a household name in the US. Over the past 12 months, it has topped the download charts, beating out other popular apps like ChatGPT and TopicsIt now operates in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest competitor, Amazon, recently introduced a Timo clone It’s called Amazon Haul and it’s very similar to the original, both in terms of the logistics supply chain and the user interface.

Temu is expected to earn more than $50 billion in total sales this year, according to analysts from AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, which could triple its 2023 figure. Temu’s website is now up Nearly 700 million visits Around the world every month, and Apple recently revealed that it was Most downloaded 2024 app on iPhones in the US.

Temu has now replaced Wish, a former online shopping site, in the cultural lexicon as a signifier of knockoffs or budget-friendly alternatives. For example, the winner of the recent Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City calls himself “Timo Thi Chalamet“. Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, many of whom learned about it through one of Temu’s inevitable and relentless advertising campaigns. At this point, Your grandmother He’s probably obsessed with Temu too.

“My friends and family who didn’t know what 2023 was going to be like now know,” says Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online markets. “Random relatives who know I study China or e-commerce will say, ‘Oh, you must know all about Timo,’ in a way that didn’t happen a year ago.”

Weigel says Temu did a few things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting the right customer segments, and finding an inexpensive way to ship products from one to another. This allowed the shopping platform to defy early analyst predictions that it would quickly exhaust its cash reserves and go out.

Temu, which is owned by PDD, one of China’s largest e-commerce giants, is moving and pivoting at a speed that its Western counterparts can’t really comprehend, says Joasas Kaziukinas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. “When you look at a company like Timo, they’re going at a thousand miles an hour,” he says.