The acquisition of Temu is now complete

Love it or hate it, you have to admit it To do he had a breakout year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned e-commerce site, known for selling a wide range of surprisingly affordable goods, took just two years to become a household name in the United States. In the last 12 months, it has topped the download charts, surpassing other viral apps such as ChatGPT and The threadsand now operates in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest rival, Amazon, recently introduced a I fear clone called Amazon Haul which is very similar to the original, both in terms of its logistics supply chain and user interface.

Temu is projected to earn more than $50 billion in total sales this year, according to analysts at AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, potentially tripling its 2023 figure. Temu’s website is now almost 700 million visits worldwide every month, and Apple recently revealed that it was the the most downloaded app of 2024 on iPhones in the United States.

Temu has now completely replaced Wish, an old business online shopping site, in the cultural lexicon as meaning knockoffs or budget-friendly alternatives. The winner of the recent Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York City, for example, is called “Ago-thée Chalamet.” Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, many of whom learned about it through one of Temu’s seemingly inevitable and relentless advertising campaigns. At this point, your grandmother is probably obsessed with Temu too.

“My friends and family members who didn’t know what it was in 2023 do now,” says Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies transnational online markets. “Casual relatives who know you study China or ecommerce will say, ‘Oh, you must know all about Temu,’ 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 a low-cost way to ship products from one to another. That allowed the trading platform to defy early analysts’ predictions that it would quickly burn through its cash reserves and catch fire.

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