Close to 20 billion US dollars, Temu’s GMV in the first half of the year exceeded that of the whole of last year?

By September this year, Temu's business will have been online for two years. According to current information, Temu has more than 70 global sites.

Compared to last year, Temu has opened new sites at a slower pace this year, but its development has not slowed down.

According to the latest news released by 36Kr, Temu's GMV in the second quarter was about 12 billion US dollars, and its sales in the first half of the year soared to about 20 billion US dollars. Last year, Temu's annual sales were 18 billion US dollars. In other words, it took only half a year for Temu to achieve last year's full-year performance. It took SHEIN 9 years to achieve this performance. However, Temu denied this data.

In any case, Temu's achievements are real. Google Trend shows that the global search volume of Temu increased by 788% in 2023 alone. On TikTok, there are more than 427 million posts with the #temu tag, and the direct topic has been viewed more than 11 billion times.

Thanks to its "low price" as its killer feature, Temu has attracted 467 million users worldwide (Similarweb data as of the end of 2023). According to Similarweb data, in June this year alone, the total number of visits to temu.com reached 519 million, and the average monthly number of visits in the past three months reached 522 million.

Behind the rapid growth is Temu's accurate grasp of strategic layout.

In March this year , Temu launched the semi-custodial model and vigorously promoted and supported it. Regarding the attitude towards the semi-custodial business, LatePost reported that a Temu person said that the internal expectation for this business is "only success and no failure, it must be done and it will definitely be done."

It is reported that as of the beginning of this month, Temu's semi-managed sales in the United States accounted for 20%. Marketplace Pulse's research pointed out that this marks Temu's shift from a supply chain model that relies entirely on direct shipments from China to diversification to reduce its reliance on small-volume duty-free shipments.

Meanwhile, Temu’s support for semi-hosted services can be seen on its homepage: 103 of the 120 recommended products are clearly marked as “Local warehouse” and promised to be delivered within five days. The same is true for the discount and best-selling pages.

People close to Temu also said that in the current US search scenario, 70% of Temu's traffic is allocated to semi-hosted products. Even if users choose to sort by sales, "Local warehouse" products with sales of only a few hundred pieces will appear on the search results homepage right after products with sales of tens of thousands. This shows how much support Temu has for semi-hosted products.

After the “initial” success in the US market, Temu announced a few days ago that its semi-custodial business is open to European entities: Germany, Italy, France, and Spain will open at 20:00 on July 17, and the UK will open at 16:00 on July 26.

Temu's senior vice president appeared at the investment conference. This seems to confirm the previous news: Temu plans to reduce the proportion of GMV in the US market this year and focus its strategic focus on Europe. It is worth noting that because Temu's semi-hosted model requires merchants to have overseas delivery capabilities, Amazon merchants who are quite familiar with this process have become Temu's main target.

However, Temu's attitude towards merchants has always been questionable. It is reported that Temu has staged another storm of deductions recently. Many merchants said that the platform has imposed huge fines on them for no reason, and the fines for some merchants even reached millions of yuan.

Temu

GMV

Semi-hosting