| Hi all, this is Zheping in Hong Kong. I recently discovered my mother has developed an obsession with smartphone games, a growing number of them. Every day, she waters her virtual fruit tree, feeds her digital cow and plays a couple of rounds of match-3 games similar to Candy Crush. And then there's her favorite Chinese card game, Fighting the Landlord. All of them are on a shopping app called Pinduoduo. By at least one metric, Pinduoduo Inc. is already China's largest e-commerce company. In 2020, the Shanghai outfit recorded 788 million annual active buyers across its platforms, slightly ahead of nemesis Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s 779 million, according to their latest earnings releases. For context, this is a David versus Goliath story where an unlikely e-commerce hero came out of seemingly nowhere to wrest shoppers away and compete for the market crown in just five years. A mix of factors, including serving more rural regions and offering group-buying features that encourage social sharing, can be credited for Pinduoduo's mega growth. But it's the mini games inside the app that really make it sticky and addictive. My mom plays those games for a good reason. She's rewarded with digital coins and beans, which can be used as coupons for her purchases on Pinduoduo. As her virtual tree and cow grow bigger, she earns free fruit and milk delivered to her real-world doorstep once in a while. And to get more water drops for her tree, she has to farm daily quests -- for example, watch the live-stream feed for 60 seconds or click into a page of products on sale. I do the same kind of grinding in games like World of Warcraft, but hers has tangible returns. One caveat to Pinduoduo's strategy is that user traffic doesn't translate perfectly to revenue. When you look at financial numbers, Pinduoduo's sales came at about $8.6 billion in 2020, way behind Alibaba's roughly $62 billion from China retail business during the same period. Meanwhile, net loss at Pinduoduo widened to $1 billion last year after the e-commerce upstart escalated its subsidy war against Alibaba and other rivals like Meituan -- with the hottest new battleground emerging in fresh produce delivery, a niche spurred into growth by the Covid-19 pandemic. My mother has shown herself willing to dedicate her time but not yet her wallet to Pinduoduo. Over the past year, she's only bought some slippers, dry nuts and river shrimp from the app. So while China's connected shoppers may be flocking to the platform and it clearly has a hook to keep them there, the next step to challenging the Alibaba giant will be convincing them to pay more than just attention to its app.—Zheping Huang | 
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