Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Temu had a banger year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned ecommerce site, known for selling an array of incredibly affordable goods, took just two years to become a household name in the US. In the last 12 months, it has climbed to the top of the download charts, surpassing other dangerous apps like ChatGPT and Threads, and is now active in many countries around the world. Even its biggest competitor, Amazon, recently launched a Temu clone called Amazon Haul that is very similar to the original, both in terms of its supply chain and user interface.
Temu is expected to earn more than $50 billion in total this year, according to analysts at AB Bernstein and Tech Buzz China, potentially tripling the figure by 2023. Temu’s website now receives nearly 700 million visits worldwide every month, and Apple recently revealed that it was the most downloaded app of 2024 on iPhones in the US.
Temu has now fully replaced Wish, the former online shopping site, in the cultural dictionary as a brand of collision or budget-friendly alternatives. The winner of a recent Timothée Chalamet contest in New York City, for example, calls himself “Temu-thée Chalamet.” Tens of millions of ordinary people have tried the app, many of whom learned about it in one of Temu’s seemingly inevitable and endless advertising campaigns. At this point, your grandmother is probably obsessed with Temu, too.
“My friends and family members didn’t know what 2023 was now,” said Moira Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University who studies international Internet markets. “Random relatives who know I’m studying China or ecommerce will say, ‘Oh, you should know all about Temu,’ in a way that wasn’t possible last year.”
Weigel says Temu did a few things right, including identifying the right suppliers in China, targeting the right customer segments, and finding a cheap way to ship products from one place to another. That allowed the mall to beat analyst predictions that it would quickly burn through its cash reserves and burst into flames.
Temu, owned by PDD, one of China’s biggest ecommerce giants, is moving and moving at a speed that its Western counterparts can’t really understand, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of ecommerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse. “If you look at a company like Temu, it moves at a thousand kilometers per hour,” he said.
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