On 24 August 2026, PDD Holdings held its second-quarter 2026 earnings call. Co-Chairman and Co-CEO Jiazhen Zhao, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO Lei Chen, and Group CFO Jiong Li presented the quarter’s results to analysts and answered questions in the Q&A that followed. Below is the transcript, translated and lightly condensed from a Chinese-language record of the call.
Opening remarks – Jiazhen Zhao, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO
Hello everyone, this is Jiazhen Zhao. Thank you all for joining our second-quarter 2026 results announcement.
Before we begin, we would like to take this opportunity to express our deep condolences on the passing of our independent director, Professor Ivonne Rietjens, and to pay tribute to the important contributions and diligent service she gave during her tenure. Professor Riches was for many years head of the toxicology department at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, with an international reputation in food research and pharmacology. Since becoming an independent director in August 2023, she offered valuable professional counsel on the company’s governance and development. Wageningen University has also been a long-term partner of the Pinduoduo Smart Agriculture Competition, bringing an international perspective and professional guidance that helped make the competition an important platform for agricultural-technology innovation and talent worldwide. We will carry on the Professor’s passion for agricultural research, continue to increase our investment in agriculture, and honour that professional spirit through long-term action, contributing more to global agriculture and food safety.
Now, back to this quarter’s results. The second quarter of this year marks a new phase in our new decade of high-quality development – moving from the opening steps to a deeper advance. The hundred-billion merchant-support strategy* we have long pursued is gradually moving from the investment phase into the phase where it bears fruit; the value of the platform and the industrial ecosystem is being released at an accelerating pace, and both the supply and demand sides have achieved upgrades in quality and efficiency. At the same time, we continue to steadily advance the major strategy of rebuilding another Pinduoduo within three years**. Our self-operated brand business***, although held back over the past half year by factors outside our control and starting more slowly than we expected, is in good overall shape; it is now fully under way and progressing smoothly. We will invest fully in the high-quality rebuilding of the supply chain, drive the upgrading of traditional industries, and keep releasing the supply chain’s inherent potential. To push supply-chain transformation and upgrading further, we have also set up a dedicated company in the Xiong’an New Area and purchased an office building there. Anchoring ourselves to the new opportunities of intelligent development, driving the upgrade of traditional manufacturing and its move towards the high end of the value chain, we have established a data-processing service centre for traditional industries and a comprehensive service centre for the high-quality development of traditional manufacturing.
MW Note: *The “hundred-billion support programme” (千亿扶持) is PDD’s roughly RMB100 billion package of fee cuts, subsidies and supply-chain help for merchants, launched in early 2025; **”rebuilding another Pinduoduo within three years” (三年再造拼多多) is its multi-year push to move merchants and factories up the value chain and help them build their own brands; ***“self-operated brand business” is the company’s new strategy, actions including Xinpinmu (新拼姆, “Pin” from Pinduoduo, “Mu” from Temu), a dedicated Shanghai entity pooling both platforms’ supply chains to build first-party brands.
Over the past quarter our performance stayed steady. Group revenue for the quarter was RMB112.4 billion, up 8% year-on-year. Net profit was RMB27.2 billion, down 12% year-on-year. This was mainly the result of a series of investments we made in the platform and the industrial ecosystem, which to some extent weighed on the quarter’s performance.
In the first half of this year, competition in ecommerce remained fierce and the market environment was complex and fast-changing, placing higher demands on platform governance and industry development alike. These brought new challenges. We continued, through a systematic set of measures – governance, fee reductions and support – to increase our investment in the platform and the industrial ecosystem, working to build a platform ecosystem in which many parties win together.
On platform governance, we substantially increased R&D spending: not only iterating and upgrading our technical control systems, but also greatly expanding our dedicated governance teams and extending governance across every category. In response to the characteristics of specific verticals, we ran targeted special-governance campaigns one by one, pushing ecosystem governance to become routine, fine-grained, automated and deep. To date, the platform has cumulatively introduced more than 150 comprehensive governance measures. In June alone, we rolled out more than 50 dedicated plans in specific segments, covering listing approval, food safety, drug safety, merchant credential checks, advertising governance, intellectual-property protection, false-marketing crackdowns, livestreaming-commerce standards, prevention of technology abuse and other key areas. We hold to the binding force of rules to shore up the compliance baseline, and rebuild the logic of governance with systematic thinking, working to create a safer, more standardised and more trustworthy consumption environment.
In food safety, we introduced a dedicated measure banning the sale of cooked-meat and prepared catering products across the board. We further raised the admission standards for merchant qualification review and information display, to prevent and reduce food-safety risks at the front end. We also set out detailed requirements for the business scope, host conduct and presentation methods of food sold via livestreaming. From product admission through to livestream presentation, we guide merchants to operate with integrity and display honestly at every step, so that consumers can buy with confidence and eat with peace of mind in the livestream room. For the difficult and stubborn points of governance, we produced and released a number of video courses, reminding merchants to actively study the rules relevant to their own industry, avoid violations, and defend their own legitimate rights within the rules. Our course of frequently asked questions on shop business licences reached 340,000 clicks within 24 hours of going live.
Building on this systematic upgrade of platform governance, our hundred-billion support programme kept increasing its investment, with its scope extending from the broad base of merchants to the upstream and downstream of agricultural regions and industrial belts (clusters), driving an all-round upgrade of the supply-chain system. In agricultural regions, the 2026 DuoDuo Good Local Specialties (多多好特产) campaign visited dozens of areas in turn – Jiangsu aquatic products, Chongqing plums, the Shanxi countryside, Hainan pineapples, Hainan lychees, Hunan pressed salted duck, Hubei crayfish and more – helping these regions cultivate new varieties, raise cultivation standards and improve cold-chain logistics, so they can convert their produce into value. Take the Hainan pineapple region: in recent years local merchants began introducing new varieties such as the golden-diamond pineapple. Unlike traditional varieties, the golden-diamond is sweet rather than sour, and doesn’t need its eyes removed or a salt-water soak. With the support of the platform’s traffic engines – flash sales and group-buying – it quickly took off and became the top fruit of the season. The certainty of ecommerce orders also gave growers the confidence to expand. To date, the golden-diamond pineapple’s planting area locally has grown from scattered trial plots to more than 100,000 mu (6,700 hectares).
In the industrial belts, our new-quality supply team visited belts including Suzhou home textiles, Shaoxing tents, Jinhua outdoor gear, Guangzhou cosmetics, Jieyang menswear and Xinyang textiles, offering systematic support across traffic exposure, data empowerment, market expansion, cost reduction, smart manufacturing and warehousing upgrades. Many factories cut their production cycles by half and sharply improved their fulfilment capability. They can both respond quickly to the platform’s large-order demand and precisely match users’ personalised custom orders, achieving a leap from traditional manufacturing to building their own brands, and driving each belt through the shift from old growth drivers to new ones. Take the Xinyang textile industry. Gushi County in Xinyang has long been a major exporter of labour: more than 200,000 people from Gushi once worked in textiles in the Jiangsu–Zhejiang region alone. In recent years, local young people have begun setting up factories at home and, through PDD, selling textile products across the country, with annual sales up four to five times on average. In small niche categories such as mosquito nets they have built leading brands, selling to Southeast Asia and Europe in summer. The area has now moved from mainly exporting labour to an industrialised development path that brings together capital, technology, talent and sales channels.
Our free-shipping-to-villages service, launched half a year ago, has also kept delivering results. We have now built a network of last-mile bases – county-level transfer warehouses and village-level pick-up points – across more than ten provinces and cities, creating large numbers of jobs in counties and villages. This has also accelerated the flow of consumer goods, home appliances, and agricultural materials and tools into rural markets, opening up new volume for all kinds of merchants and helping users in remote villages live better. Take Shandong: as a major agricultural province, it is a key area for PDD’s free-shipping-to-villages rollout. Earlier pilots in places such as Juancheng in Heze and Yishui in Linyi already delivered notable results, with rural order volumes multiplying. And Qingzhou, an important domestic production base for water-soluble and speciality fertilisers, is home to many agricultural-input firms now riding this momentum to sell to more villages nationwide.
As a public platform, we have always actively taken on social responsibility and given back to society. Not long ago, several parts of Guangxi suffered severe flooding after a typhoon and heavy rain. To support front-line relief with all our strength, PDD urgently donated RMB10 million in cash to the affected areas, for buying supplies and relief equipment, resettling those affected, and helping with reconstruction.
Looking to the development of the new decade ahead, we are more convinced than ever that high-quality development is, for us, both an all-out sprint and a persistent long-distance run. Going forward, we will continue to uphold long-termism, and with the patience and steadiness of ten years spent sharpening a single sword, walk every step of this new decade of high-quality development steadily, solidly and deeply. We will keep deepening the supply chain, keep empowering merchants and industries, create better goods and services for consumers, and through concrete action create more positive value for users, merchants and society.
Opening remarks – Lei Chen, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO
Hello everyone, this is Lei Chen. Thank you for joining our second-quarter 2026 results call. In the first half of the year, we made real progress under our new-decade high-quality-development strategy, laying a solid foundation for long-term growth. As Jiazhen just mentioned, we focused on two big things.
First, we used the hundred-billion support programme to keep giving back to consumers and merchants, while comprehensively upgrading our platform-governance framework. These measures help make the platform and the broader industrial ecosystem healthier. Second, we continued to pursue the strategic goal of rebuilding another Pinduoduo within three years, increasing investment to help our partners build brands of their own.
This quarter, the long-term investment of the hundred-billion support programme began to show results within a healthier platform ecosystem. On the supply side, merchants benefited from fee reductions, merchant-support policies and more robust platform governance. These measures spur merchants to innovate, giving rise to a large number of new products and new brands, and bringing incremental demand and fresh sources of growth. Many manufacturing firms are adopting digital and intelligent technologies to run customised production, lifting the overall quality and efficiency of the supply chain and moving manufacturers towards entirely new development models. On the demand side, we continue to meet consumers’ ever-changing needs across categories and across many consumption scenarios. This is especially pronounced in rural areas: the free-shipping-to-villages programme has greatly widened the range of goods rural consumers can choose from, helping to improve local quality of life.
Building on the supply-chain capabilities and brand-building experience accumulated through the hundred-billion support programme, this quarter we advanced supply-chain integration further. Our teams went deep into the industrial belts of various categories, beginning early cooperation with quality suppliers. By setting clear standards for products, production processes and quality control, we help merchants and manufacturers adjust their operating models and develop a batch of higher-quality, better-margin products. Through these efforts, we keep releasing the strength and potential held within the supply chain as manufacturing climbs towards the upper reaches of the value chain.
Since the start of the year, the global regulatory and compliance environment has changed enormously. That change brings both challenges and opportunities, and at the same time sets a higher bar for responsibility. We sit at a unique intersection in global trade, and must constantly adapt to differing international regulatory regimes. At the same time, our business reaches into the daily lives of billions of ordinary people around the world – the growth potential is huge, but the expectations and accountability standards placed on us have risen accordingly. We will hold fast to our mission, do every task diligently, keep strengthening our compliance capabilities and build out a sound platform-governance system. On intellectual-property protection, we combine screening technology with expert review to monitor and assess product listings across all categories in real time, resolving IP risks early and driving a systematic improvement in the platform’s IP protection.
We are firmly and continuously investing in the supply chain, steadily rolling out structural upgrades. Our ultimate goal is to build a highly resilient ecommerce platform that consumers around the world can trust – one where prices are competitive and quality is excellent. As we enter the new decade, we remain highly focused on our core ecommerce business. By deepening supply-chain investment, we continue to empower merchants and the broader industry, and to deliver more high-quality products and services. We are confident we can turn the strategy of rebuilding another Pinduoduo within three years into results that can be implemented and verified – helping traditional suppliers seize the opportunities of the intelligent era, empowering them to transform and upgrade, climb the value chain, and build brands with global influence.
The Q&A
Q: Last quarter the company announced a brand-new self-operated brand strategy. Could management share the latest progress? How should the market think about the impact of self-operated brands once they go live – for instance, the balance of emphasis between self-operated goods and third-party (3P) goods, and what considerations management has around the pricing of self-operated goods?
Jiazhen Zhao: The self-operated brand business is an important extension of our long-term direction of investing in the supply chain. We hope to build deep product co-creation relationships with manufacturing firms that have both the capability and the willingness, drawing on the platform’s strengths in market insight and global channels to raise the certainty of brand development and value creation along the industry chain, and to deliver that incremental value, tangibly, back to the whole chain.
On the pace: in the early stage, we will selectively put down roots in core categories where the platform and the supply chain hold distinctive advantages, cooperating with manufacturers over the long term to jointly take part in product definition, R&D, quality standards and market validation. This business needs a fairly long period of cultivation and adjustment, and getting it off the ground has taken longer than we first expected – but it is a clear, long-term strategic direction for the platform. We will stay patient and do every link well. We are confident in the long-term prospects of self-operated brands.
On the specifics of operating strategy, the platform’s open and fair underlying mechanism will not change. We have always held that continuously providing consumers with quality goods and services depends on a healthy, fair and diverse supply ecosystem. In future, our self-operated brand goods and third-party merchants’ goods will together meet consumers’ diverse needs across different scenarios and different positionings, ultimately creating a platform ecosystem in which many parties win.
Q: Good evening, and thank you for taking my questions. My first question is about the company’s globalisation business. We note that from July this year the EU has begun levying a transitional tariff on low-value cross-border parcels. How much impact do management expect these tariff changes – and the broader overseas regulatory environment of the past year – to have on the platform’s overall order volume? In the face of these policy headwinds, what will the company’s globalisation strategy be going forward? My second question concerns the self-operated brand strategy the company announced last quarter [as above].
Lei Chen: Let me take your first question, on the globalisation business. Recently the globalisation business has indeed faced enormous change in the regulatory and compliance environment, which brings us both difficulties and opportunities, and we feel the weight of the responsibility on our shoulders. The company sits at a special junction of the global economy and trade: we face pressure from the differing regulatory policies of each region, and at the same time we occupy a very particular position. Our business today touches the daily lives of billions of people worldwide, the room for growth is enormous, and with that comes higher expectations of responsibility.
On the EU tariff change you mentioned, the team has been actively studying and adapting throughout. Drawing on experience accumulated over the years, we are adjusting the supply chain and optimising fulfilment routes. While strictly holding the compliance line, we are balancing consumer experience, merchant operations and the long-term development of the business. In the short term, cross-border orders in the affected markets will see lower fulfilment efficiency and higher costs, and the related business growth will indeed come under considerable pressure. But over the medium to long term, the change in the external environment further underscores the importance of investing in the supply chain, and pushes us to speed up building the relevant capabilities. On one hand, we keep bringing in and supporting more quality local merchants to enrich local supply; on the other, we are accelerating the layout of local warehouses and localised fulfilment infrastructure, and expanding the coverage of local shipping. Through this investment we hope to integrate more deeply into every market we serve, shore up the supply-chain base, and improve our resilience against risk, so that we can better weather swings in the environment.
Beyond supply-chain capability, compliance and platform governance are also foundational capabilities we invest in for the long term. We keep optimising governance, further improving product quality and delivering on consumer protection, with the goal of building a platform that consumers around the world can trust. At the same time, to create a healthy and fair business environment for merchants globally, we have done a great deal of work on IP compliance. Relying on technical screening plus manual review, the platform has built systematic IP-protection capabilities. Recently, we prevailed on all counts in IP litigation against an industry peer, which bears out that this IP-protection mechanism works. We will firmly protect the legitimate rights of our ecosystem partners and build a fair, reliable operating environment. Regulatory-policy change is a challenge the whole industry faces together. We have full confidence in our team’s execution and our organisational resilience, and we will not change the long-term direction of the globalisation business because of short-term fluctuations. Going forward, we will keep our feet on the ground and do the work on supply chain, compliance and consumer service, committed to giving global consumers a shopping platform that is stable over the long run, competitively priced, solid in quality and worthy of trust – and to winning consumers’ affection and trust.
Jiazhen Zhao: Thomas, hello – let me take your second question. The self-operated brand business is an important extension of our long-term investment in the supply chain. We hope to build deep product co-creation partnerships with manufacturing firms that have both the strength and the willingness, drawing on the platform’s capabilities in market insight and global channels to advance brand development along the industry chain, raise the certainty of value creation, and return that incremental value, tangibly, to the whole chain. On the pacing, in the early stage we will selectively cultivate the core categories where the platform and supply chain have distinctive advantages, cooperating with manufacturers over the long term to jointly take part in product definition, R&D, quality-standard setting and market validation. Although this business needs a fairly long period of cultivation and adjustment, and the actual start has taken longer than first expected, it is a clear long-term strategic direction for the platform. We will stay patient and put every link firmly in place; we are optimistic about the long-term prospects of self-operated brands. On operating strategy, the platform’s open and fair underlying mechanism will not change. We have always believed that continuously providing consumers with quality goods and services depends on a healthy, fair and diverse supply-chain ecosystem. In future, self-operated goods and third-party merchants’ goods will together meet consumers’ diverse needs across different scenarios and positionings, ultimately achieving a multi-win platform ecosystem.
Q: Good evening to management, and thank you for taking my questions. I have two. First, we see that other leading global ecommerce platforms, as they scale, step up investment in logistics and fulfilment infrastructure – building their own warehousing networks and delivery teams. How does management view the company’s investment strategy on logistics and fulfilment going forward? Second, over the past while many global peers have invested heavily in instant retail. How does management assess the impact of this new consumption habit on the industry’s competitive landscape and on the company’s core business? Against a backdrop of the industry racing to build out half-hour and one-hour delivery, what strategy will the company use to keep consolidating user mindshare and market share?
Jiazhen Zhao: Hello, this is Jiazhen Zhao. Let me first take the question on logistics and fulfilment investment. As with our investment in other areas, we always start from the consumer experience and, targeting merchants’ real operating pain points, make investments that create genuine, targeted value. The focus of our investment differs by market and by business model.
In the domestic market, ecommerce logistics networks in the vast majority of areas are already relatively mature. But in the remote western regions and the vast countryside, last-mile delivery still faces clear bottlenecks. For this, we have invested heavily to improve the logistics chain, firmly advancing free-shipping-to-villages and “ecommerce westward movement” within the hundred-billion support framework. To give a few examples, since free-shipping-to-villages rolled out at the end of last year: Youxian County in Hunan has built village pick-up points covering all 177 of its villages; in Yishui, Shandong, daily rural parcel deliveries have risen by more than ten thousand. This infrastructure lets agricultural inputs such as fertiliser reach the fields directly, and at the same time lets large volumes of quality goods flow smoothly down to the villages, releasing the huge consumption potential of less-developed areas and markedly raising merchants’ order-conversion rates when selling into these regions.
In some overseas markets, merchants ship point-to-point in a fragmented way, making it hard to achieve the scale effects of consolidated shipping, which pushes overall fulfilment costs up and suppresses a portion of consumer demand. For markets like these, we make targeted investments in building and running strategic warehouses, helping local merchants optimise their fulfilment processes, lowering logistics barriers, and giving local consumers a more stable and reliable delivery experience. To come back to your question: going forward we will keep to this problem-oriented approach to fulfilment investment, building supply-chain capability solidly. By improving fulfilment efficiency and fulfilment certainty, we improve the consumer experience, foster a positive cycle between supply and demand, and strengthen the platform’s long-term, organic growth momentum.
Now to your second question. The retail-ecommerce landscape has always evolved quickly, with innovative business models constantly emerging. Instant retail, compared to our core ecommerce and grocery businesses (Duoduo Grocery), each address different consumer needs in different scenarios. At the current stage of the business, the underlying links and the business models of the two differ greatly, and the synergy they can generate is fairly limited. So at this stage, we choose to concentrate our resources and energy on the areas where we have already built up advantages and can create differentiated value. As the industry matures, each platform will choose a different service path based on the capabilities it has accumulated. For us, the path has always been clear: keep making the supply chain solid.
Our current supply-chain investment works on two fronts at once – getting the goods ready, and getting the roads built. On getting the goods ready, through dedicated programmes such as new-quality supply and DuoDuo Good Local Specialties, we support quality traditional factories, raise their product strength and brand capability, and drive an upgrade in value on the supply side, so consumers can buy domestic goods with a better quality-to-price ratio. On getting the roads built, through infrastructure projects such as free-shipping-to-villages, we improve the transfer network and fill the last-mile gaps in remote areas, so consumers in more regions enjoy the savings and convenience of ecommerce. The supply-chain investment we have chosen may not be the fastest to show results in the short term, but over the long term it creates real value for the industry, for consumers and for the merchant ecosystem. We will keep doing this fundamental but crucial work, and keep creating the value that is uniquely ours for consumers and merchants.
Q: Good evening, Mr Chen and Mr Zhao, and thank you for taking my questions. Two questions. First, on the platform’s long-term commercialisation potential. The hundred-billion support programme has been running for a year; after this series of investments, what changes have there been in the health and activity of the merchant ecosystem? As the merchant ecosystem improves, can that translate in future into greater willingness among merchants to spend on advertising, lifting the platform’s monetisation rate? Second, on the revenue-growth outlook. Given the market’s performance in the first half, how does management view the full-year consumption trend? Looking ahead, on top of overall consumption growth, is there a chance for the platform’s revenue to outpace the broader market?
Jiazhen Zhao: Hello, this is Jiazhen Zhao. As mentioned earlier, the hundred-billion support programme is gradually entering the stage where its effect on industry efficiency shows through. From the fee reductions of 2024 to the launch of the hundred-billion support programme early last year, the platform’s resource tilt and the supply chain help now cover the major agricultural regions and manufacturing belts. Over this period, we have been glad to see a large number of belt merchants seize the chance to upgrade their quality-price positioning. For example, a Guangdong cosmetics brand used the platform’s support to lower its customer-acquisition and operating costs, put the profit it saved into two years of R&D, and transformed into a domestic brand holding its own patents. A merchant in the Zhongshan lighting belt used the platform’s efficient product-testing tools to step up R&D on high-quality light sources and smart products, and created a hit that sold several million RMB within months of launch. These real cases prove that the supply-chain help measures work. Of course, improving the merchant ecosystem takes long-term accumulation, and we will keep investing unwaveringly to help more merchants achieve healthy, sustainable operations.
An ecommerce platform is a two-sided network: merchants’ room to grow is tightly bound up with a quality consumer experience and a healthy platform ecosystem. The primary goal of the hundred-billion support programme is to improve product quality, the supply chain and the merchant ecosystem, so that small and medium merchants put the costs they save into upgrading their products. Over the long term, lower merchant operating costs, recovering margins and stronger operating confidence will ultimately drive sustained organic growth in the platform’s value.
Jiong Li: Let me take the second question. In the first half, as policies to promote consumption kept going live, the domestic consumer market expanded steadily and the penetration of online retail continued to rise. We remain positive on the long-term potential of the domestic consumer market and the ecommerce industry. Ecommerce has entered a new stage, in which platforms need to take a more active role in solving supply-chain mismatches and tapping new sources of growth. Take the free-shipping-to-villages project: we invest in building a more complete last-mile delivery network, transfer warehouses and village pickup points. These measures improve the rural commerce-and-circulation network and stimulate rural consumer demand. In the first half, rural retail grew faster than the broader market, showing enormous potential. As Jiazhen just said, we keep focusing on building the platform ecosystem and helping merchants grow. Once the groundwork is done well, the platform’s organic value will grow sustainably alongside it. Thank you.
