US’s Most Popular Apps Continue to Leverage Aggressive eCommerce Expansion

The ongoing expansion of ecommerce boosted PDD Holdings’ Temu to the top ranking among the US’s most downloaded apps in 2023. That knocked TikTok off of the lofty perch it achieved last year and exemplified how critical it will be for the short-form video and livestreaming app to continue building out its ecommerce business after launching an online shop in the US last September. eCommerce fashion platform Shein is on track for a Q1 2024 IPO that should result in a significantly larger valuation than any of 2023’s biggest public debuts by a long shot. eCommerce spending on Black Friday and Cyber Monday rose sharply YoY this year, which may power online sales’ share of total retail revenues to an all-time high in the fourth quarter.

Related ETF: ProShares Long Online/Short Stores ETF (CLIX)

Rapidly growing ecommerce platform Temu, a subsidiary of China’s PDD Holdings, became the US’s most downloaded app in 2023. That rise knocked TikTok from its lofty perch at the top of last year’s list and overcame competition from Meta and Google’s suite of applications. Temu’s triumph was a testament to resurgent ecommerce growth and the ability of newer upstarts to compete with sprawling enterprises like Amazon in the US, as well as Alibaba and JD.com in China. Data from Apptopia, cited by Bloomberg, showed that consumers were spending an average of 18 minutes per day in Temu’s app, compared with just 10 to 11 minutes in Amazon’s and Alibaba’s AliExpress apps. Achieving a market cap of $185 billion in the past several days helped PDD overcome Alibaba as China’s most valuable ecommerce firm.

MRP noted late last month that ecommerce fashion brand, Shein, had filed to go public in the US, recruiting Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters for the IPO – expected in early 2024. If Shein goes to market materially above its most recent private market valuation of $66 billion, it would be…