If you polled Americans on whether they would be comfortable handing over sensitive personal and financial information to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), you would likely get a near-unanimous declaration of “no!”
But this is precisely what more than 100 million Americans using Temu have done, according to analysis by SimilarWeb.
Temu, a China-based e-commerce company, has witnessed meteoric growth since its inception in 2022. It has its sights set on $60 billion in sales this year, after an impressive showing in 2023 as the second-fastest-growing website behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Known for its heavily discounted products (made less expensive by leveraging relaxed Chinese labor, manufacturing, and distribution laws), Temu is all-in on saturating the American e-commerce marketplace — not that slave labor could ever be “relaxed.”
In addition to spending 76 percent of its budget on social media ads and millions more on commercials — including its unsettling, CCP propaganda-laden “Shop Like a Billionaire” Super Bowl ads — it is operating at a staggering loss. By one estimate, Temu is losing $30 per order in an effort to penetrate the American consumer market.
If the company was comprised of marketing geniuses with extensive experience scaling up e-commerce giants, you might be able to spin this as another risky long-term start-up strategy. But a recent report revealed that top Temu executives — including executives overseeing their public and legal affairs, public relations, and operations — are former high-ranking officials of the CCP. Perhaps this is one of many reasons why they’re
