Duan Yongping, who understands Pop Mart, is increasingly confused about Pinduoduo.

Recently, the market has been closely watching Duan Yongping's financial cards.

To be precise, it's about where Duan Yongping is placing his bets at the delicate juncture of May 2026.

On one hand, he has been publicly and continuously increasing his holdings in Pop Mart.

On May 25th, through the H&H Foundation and its affiliated family trust accounts, he bought 9.8232 million shares at an average price of HK$150 per share, with a total transaction value of HK$1.47 billion. After this position - building, he holds a total of 76.3716 million shares of Pop Mart, accounting for 5.69% of the total shares, officially crossing the 5% legal disclosure line for Hong Kong stocks and becoming one of the core major shareholders of Pop Mart.

On the other hand, there is Pinduoduo, which he has held for many years.

Two days after he disclosed his stake in Pop Mart, before the U.S. stock market opened on May 27th, Pinduoduo released its first - quarter financial report for 2026. Its revenue was 106.2 billion yuan, a year - on - year increase of 11%, lower than the market expectation of 13.5%, and the growth rate further slowed down compared with the previous quarter.

The revenue reflecting the group's overall online marketing business was 49.9 billion yuan, with only a 2.5% year - on - year increase, far lower than the market's general expectation of 8%, which particularly highlighted the weak growth of its domestic main - site advertising business. The net profit attributable to common shareholders was 12.5 billion yuan, a year - on - year decline of 15%.

On the day the financial report was released, Pinduoduo's U.S. stocks fell by more than 10% before the market opened, continued to decline after the opening, and the maximum intraday decline was about 11%, hitting a 52 - week low. As of the close, the stock price fell by about 10.4%, hitting a new low in nearly a year.

Within a one - week time frame, these two highly dramatic capital events have pushed the same protagonist to the forefront.

1. Duan Yongping's Strength Has Never Been Reading Financial Reports

Many people like to study what Duan Yongping buys, but what's more worth looking at is actually why he buys.

In the past twenty years, whether it's NetEase, Apple, Moutai, or Tencent, the companies Duan Yongping invested in seem diversified, but in essence, they all belong to the same type of business: users will come back voluntarily.

Apple doesn't need to offer daily subsidies, neither does Moutai, nor does Tencent.

Users are willing to come back, make repeat purchases, and turn a preference into a long - term choice.

The most valuable asset of these companies is not the factory, not the distribution channels, nor the traffic, but the users' minds.

What Duan Yongping is best at understanding has never been the business model, but people.

He answered a question on Xueqiu. Someone asked him: "Companies like Apple and Moutai can provide consumers with differentiated products and services in the long run. Do you think Pop Mart can do the same?"

His answer was just one sentence:

"Obviously, they can in terms of emotional value!"

This seemingly casual statement actually hits the core pain point of consumer goods investment. The essence of differentiation has never been the functional stacking of products, but the sense of value that consumers are willing to pay a premium for under emotional identification.

This is Duan Yongping's investment system, and it's also what Buffett has repeatedly emphasized. Words like moat, brand, repeat purchase, and pricing power actually all point to the same proposition: Why do users come back?

2. Pop Mart Is Actually Quite Similar to Apple

Duan Yongping first publicly talked about Pop Mart in August 2025.

At that time, he said: "The products of this company are really interesting, and the founder is also an interesting person. It's really remarkable that they've achieved what they have today, but I can't predict what the company will be like in ten years."

In the following months, he said the same thing several times.

In December 2025: "Life is busy. I can skip things I don't understand."

In January 2026: "I've roughly looked at Pop Mart and think they're really good. However, I still can't understand why people need this kind of thing."

A person who has studied consumption for a lifetime has been saying he doesn't understand Pop Mart for almost a year.

The turning point was on March 25th when Pop Mart released its 2025 annual report.

On March 30th, he posted a message on Xueqiu: "I've decided to take back my statement that I won't invest in Pop Mart."

In the following week, he did three things: read Wang Ning's "Because of Uniqueness"; visited Pop Mart stores at Westfield in the United States twice to see who the customers were in person; and used his own experience of buying virtual costumes in "Fantasy Westward Journey" as an analogy.

On April 2nd, he wrote a paragraph on Xueqiu:

"I don't understand Pop Mart, but I understand the words 'like is like'. This is the same as many people not understanding why someone would spend hundreds of thousands of yuan on a golf club membership card and still think it's cheap. It's just incomprehensible to those who don't play golf. I remember seeing many such phenomena when I played 'Fantasy' many years ago."

On April 4th, he came to the conclusion: "right business, right people! right price seems to have appeared again."

On April 9th, "My Pop Mart 'insurance company' officially opened."

By May 25th, he completed the stake - disclosure.

Many people were surprised when they first saw Duan Yongping buying Pop Mart.

On the surface, Pop Mart and Apple are completely different. One sells mobile phones, and the other sells toys. One is a technology company, and the other is a trendy toy company.

But from Duan Yongping's perspective, they are very similar.

Apple doesn't just sell mobile phones, and Pop Mart doesn't just sell dolls. What they really sell is a kind of emotional identification.

Why do people line up to buy LABUBU? Why are people willing to repeatedly draw blind boxes? Why can a plastic doll have the same premium ability as a luxury item?

These questions are essentially the same as those about Apple - users buy not for the function, but for the identification; not for the cost, but for the emotion; not for the product, but for the brand.

In the past few years, many investors have been trying to understand Pop Mart with the logic of the manufacturing industry. Later, they found they couldn't.

Because Pop Mart is becoming less and less like a consumer goods company and more and more like a cultural company.

And this is exactly what Duan Yongping is most familiar with.

Because Apple is like this, Moutai is like this, and to some extent, Tencent is also like this.

3. Pinduoduo's Problem Is Exactly the Opposite

If Pop Mart is becoming more and more like Apple, then Pinduoduo is becoming a completely different species.

In the past few years, Pinduoduo has been one of the most successful stories in the Chinese Internet industry. It has the fastest growth, the highest profit, and the strongest efficiency, and it even reshuffled the entire e - commerce industry for a while.

But the really remarkable thing about Pinduoduo is not just the traffic, algorithms, or supply chain, but efficiency itself. It can connect the largest supply in China with the most sensitive demand, continuously compress the intermediate costs, and push the operating efficiency of the entire system to the limit.

This is Huang Zheng's greatest strength. But the problem also lies here.

Can efficiency really form an insurmountable moat? This is a highly controversial ultimate capital proposition.

Apple's moat is its brand, Moutai's moat is its brand, and Tencent's moat is its relationship network. These things have a compound - interest effect that resists the erosion of time and will probably still exist ten years later. But efficiency is different.

Efficiency is an extremely tight dynamic balance. It must constantly prove to the market that it is always leading and running faster than its peers. Once the platform experiences a slight stagnation in cost - reduction and efficiency - improvement, the ecological contradictions originally covered by high - turnover will instantly lose speed.

What people care most about in this Q1 financial report is not just that the revenue and profit are lower than expected, but that a long - warned hidden worry has begun to surface, and the platform's advertising monetization rate has declined significantly.

Behind this is the standardization of e - commerce tax payment.

As the regulatory requirements change from merchants self - reporting to unified reporting by the platform, small and medium - sized merchants that have long maintained their profits through "flexible operations" are starting to really feel the pressure. As their profit margins are squeezed, their advertising budgets naturally shrink accordingly. This exactly hits the root that Pinduoduo relies on the most.

Even earlier, Pinduoduo's stock price in the past two years has almost wiped out all the valuation premiums compared with Alibaba and JD.com.

The once - shining star in the e - commerce industry is slowly becoming a company that is increasingly difficult to understand.

4. A 100 - Billion - Yuan Bet

On the day of the financial report on May 27th, Pinduoduo also disclosed a bigger move in a conference call.

In December last year, the company announced the "Recreate Pinduoduo in Three Years" strategy at its annual general meeting.

In March this year, the special - purpose company "New Pinmu" was officially established in Shanghai, with an initial cash injection of 15 billion yuan. It plans to invest a total of 100 billion yuan in the next three years. The model is brand self - operation. The platform is responsible for design, product selection, pricing, promotion, and fulfillment, and only outsources production to external partners. The target market starts from the United States and will gradually expand to Europe and Southeast Asia.

Co - CEO Zhao Jiazhen said a very strategic sentence in the conference call:

Continuing to focus on the supply chain will be the company's core strategy for the next decade. Compared with short - term performance, we are more focused on the long - term value brought by nurturing the ecosystem and focusing on the supply chain.

This means that the 15% decline in the net profit attributable to the parent company of 1.25 billion yuan is not entirely due to business deterioration, but also an active sacrifice of profit. Pinduoduo is using its cash flow to subsidize a transformation that may change the company's fate.

And the direction of this transformation is exactly what it was not good at in the past: building a brand.

That is to say, Pinduoduo's senior management has also realized the approaching efficiency ceiling. It is trying to jump over the quagmire and become a time - friendly company that can build a brand and make users come back voluntarily on the other side.

This is a big turn. But it's also a turn full of uncertainties. Because what it has to do is to transform from a traffic platform that understands absolute low prices best in the world into a slow - paced company that can build a brand.

These two sets of genes have never been successfully integrated in the same company in the past business history.

5. Duan Yongping Remains Silent

Duan Yongping last made a large - scale increase in his Pinduoduo holdings in Q1.

According to the 13F document he officially submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in mid - May, as of March 31st, the H&H Fund he manages increased its Pinduoduo holdings by more than 8 million shares, and the holding ratio increased from 7.5% to 10.09%. The market value at the end of the period was about $2 billion, making it the fourth - largest heavy - position stock in the fund.

In the same document, he liquidated his Alibaba holdings, newly established a position in Tesla, and significantly increased his holdings in NVIDIA.

That was his clear stance on Chinese assets in Q1: selling Alibaba and increasing his investment in Pinduoduo.

But since the financial report on May 27th, Duan Yongping has not said a word about Pinduoduo.

This is in sharp contrast to his frequent statements about Pop Mart. From March 30th to the end of May, he talked about Pop Mart, emotional value, Wang Ning's ability, and "right business right people" on Xueqiu over and over again.

But he remains silent about Pinduoduo.

Silence itself is not a conclusion, but it is a signal.

An investor who is used to expressing his attitude through holdings and explaining his judgments with words chooses to remain silent when facing an important performance turning point of his heavy - position stock. This at least shows that he himself is still trying to understand it again.

It's not that he won't invest, but he needs to observe again. This cautious suspension state is more thought - provoking than any clear - cut statement.

6. The Gap Between Two Eras

I'm increasingly feeling that this matter is not essentially about Pop Mart or Pinduoduo.

It's a switch in the way Chinese companies create value.

Pinduoduo represents the era of efficiency, optimizing the supply chain, reducing costs, eliminating premiums, and allowing users to spend less money.

Pop Mart represents the era of brands, creating emotions, creating culture, creating premiums, and making users willing to spend more money.

One makes users buy because it's cost - effective, and the other makes users buy because they like it.

In the past decade, the Chinese Internet and even the entire venture - capital circle have most highly valued the former. Words like scale, efficiency, growth, and traffic have formed the main theme of an era. But in the past two years, more and more capital is willing to pay for brands, culture, and emotional value again, rather than blindly believing in the limit of efficiency as before.

So we can see that Pinduoduo is getting cheaper, and Pop Mart is getting more expensive.

This is not entirely a performance issue, but a re - pricing by the capital market of the future way of value creation.

It's worth noting that Pinduoduo itself has also noticed this change. Its 100 - billion - yuan "recreate" plan is essentially an active move towards the brand era.

It's just that no one can answer whether this turn can be successful. It has to move from a most familiar ability to a most unfamiliar one.

Duan Yongping currently holds both Pop Mart and Pinduoduo. One is already in the world he is familiar with, and the other is setting off towards the world he is familiar with.

But the former has already succeeded, and the latter has just started.

He can understand the former and is willing to accompany the latter for a while. It's just that this journey may be more difficult to judge than any of his previous investments.

[Beyond the Page] Words:

I used to think that the most remarkable ability of a company was to let users save money.

Later, I gradually realized.

Maybe a more remarkable ability is to make users willing to spend money.

These two abilities seem to differ by only one word. But what lies between them may be two eras.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Beyond the Page", author: Ban Jun. Republished with authorization from 36Kr.