Chinese e-commerce firm Pinduoduo on Monday formed a strategic alliance with major home appliance maker Midea to customize washing machines, with a target to sell 1 million units per year.
Midea will soon make all its current products available on the platform, aiming to grow its community there to draw support for the design of new products and gain data from the sales process. The cooperation was launched in September with the Wuhao Xiaojiadian festival, which provided Pinduoduo customers the most attractively priced Midea products.
“Pinduoduo offers a gateway to a broad, diversified consumer base that is highly engaged and driving consumer spending patterns,” a Pinduoduo spokesman told KrASIA on Tuesday.
Midea is one of Pinduoduo’s consumer-to-manufacturer (C2M) partners with which it teamed up in an effort to enrich its goods offering. As of October, the platform has worked with more than 1,500 companies to customize products—TV set producer Shenzhen MTC, tissue paper maker Sipiao, and cookware producer Sanho among them.
Pinduoduos’s GMV reached RMB 1.46 trillion (USD 214.7 billion) in the twelve months ended September 30, 2020, up 73% year-on-year.
Its peers Alibaba and JD.com are similarly looking at C2M to offer demand-driven products. Alibaba unveiled a digital factory called Xunxi to produce such products for retailers in September.