Pinduoduo's sales and marketing expenses in Q2 this year were 26.0491 billion yuan (about 3.5845 billion U.S. dollars), an increase of 48% compared with 17.5422 billion yuan in the same period of 2023, and an country code philippines mobile increase of 11% compared with the marketing expenses of 23.4 billion yuan in Q1. The proportion of marketing expenses to revenue in this quarter was 31%, which was close to Q4 last year.
At the same time, in the second quarter of this year, Pinduoduo's R&D investment reached 2.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6%, mainly due to a new round of investment in operations and R&D. It is understood that Pinduoduo will invest 10 billion yuan in resource packages to support new merchants and reduce merchants' transaction fees by 10 billion yuan in the next year, further expanding the scale of investment.
In the conference call, Zhao Jiazhen admitted that the overall competitive environment has been intensifying over the past few quarters. "Competition" as the main theme of the e-commerce industry is inevitable, and revenue growth may slow down. The significant decline in revenue growth in the second quarter also shows that high income growth is unsustainable.
"In this process, sacrificing short-term profits is necessary, and management has reached a consensus that they are willing to pay a huge current price for long-term health.