Pinduoduo's goal is to 'cultivate more Xiaomi'

In 2014, at the World Internet Conference, Jack Ma once said Alibaba's goal was to "cultivate more companies like JD.com" and help these companies make profits.

Looking back now, this statement has obviously fallen short, but we won't evaluate it today.

Instead, the logical structure of this statement reminds me of another more interesting comparison today: Pinduoduo and Xiaomi.

Both companies have benefited from the term "cost-performance ratio," but their core logics are completely different.

Xiaomi is a strong brand that wants to become a platform.

Pinduoduo is a strong platform that suppresses brands while also nurturing them.

Xiaomi is first and foremost a brand, a national brand with its own traffic.

After establishing Xiaomi as a golden brand, Lei Jun wanted to build an ecosystem chain—a platform.

Thus, we've seen Xiaomi cover products across all industries, from power banks and sockets to robot vacuums, from Mi Home to Youpin.

Xiaomi's logic is simple: Use our brand endorsement and channel traffic to empower new players and overthrow the old world.

But this model has an almost unsolvable problem: conflict of interest—in other words, "being both the referee and the player."

Because Xiaomi's brand is too strong, it is not just an enabler but also a predator.

For many ecosystem chain companies, such as Roborock and Ninebot, they relied on Xiaomi in the early stages but later inevitably moved toward "de-Xiaomization" to pursue higher profits and independent valuations.

The same goes for consumers. When everything carries Xiaomi's logo, there's the benefit of "trust makes things simple," but once quality control issues arise in some products, Xiaomi has to bear the consequences, good or bad, with no room for excuses, facing immense pressure and even domino-effect risks.

Pinduoduo doesn't have this problem. It focuses solely on being a "referee" and doesn't step onto the field as a "player."

The advantage of this is that it only needs to act as a fair order provider, so its algorithm logic is extremely simple and brutal: Whoever can lower prices and ensure quality—whoever can be Pinduoduo's "Xiaomi"—gets the traffic.

This mechanism forces tens of thousands of industrial factories in China to do one thing: obsess over efficiency like Xiaomi and ruthlessly cut costs like Xiaomi.

At the same time, they can keep the "brand" in their own hands—as long as they can win.

In short, Xiaomi uses a super brand to "absorb" production capacity, cherry-picking the best across industries.

Pinduoduo, on the other hand, uses a ruthless evolutionary mechanism infinitely close to the market economy itself to force out tens of thousands of "Xiaomis."

All roads lead to Rome. In the end, it's still about products and services.

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