PDD Q3 2025: The Earnings and the Long-Tail Risk I Was Missing

The only company talking risks while rivals sell fantasies.

The Mr. Hydes in a Market Full of Dr. Jekyll

Most companies still treat earnings calls like amateur theatre. The standard script is predictable: minimise the problems, pretend the risks don’t exist, recycle a few blue-sky fantasies, and hope investors nod along. Some do it with impressive confidence.

Didi once explained to me that they would take 30% of Brazil’s food delivery market, apparently without any chance of burning billions or failing outright. Baidu proudly announced in their Q2 2025 call that ALL robo-taxis were now safety-driver-free, a curious achievement considering that one week before that in Shenzhen EVERY single car I saw had a human behind the wheel.

JD keeps overselling itself to a level that would be funny if it weren’t so misleading. They repeatedly claim broad consumer mindshare across all categories, when in reality that “mindshare” only exists in electronics; everywhere else, JD is an unimportant player in China’s e-commerce market. And the latest gem was their insistence that their food-delivery business will ultimately be profitable as a standalone entity.

Our goal is to create a sustainable business that drives healthy order growth and at the same time, gradually and long scale effect and enhance operations with better UE. Ultimately, JD food delivery should be a self-sustaining business.

JD, Q3 2025 call

With a market share of roughly 10% against Meituan and Ele.me both roughly 45%, that is a structural disadvantage of roughly 4.5 to 1. Businesses with that kind of scale gap almost never reach sustained profitability — just ask Ele.me, which never managed to escape its disadvantage (70/30 marketshare for Meituan vs. Ele.me) before Alibaba went all-in on food delivery.

And then there is Pinduoduo the strange outlier: the one player that insists on highlighting what could go wrong. No victory laps, no fantasy projections. Their international expansion could easily be framed as a “massive opportunity across multiple continents.” Instead, they talk about “heightened uncertainty,” “regulatory unpredictability,” and “volatility in outcomes.” If JD owned Temu, we all know the script would sound very different — including dozens of mentions of “consumer mindshare.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about why Pinduoduo behaves this way, and a few weeks ago the pieces finally fell into place. A conversation with one of ByteDance’s early investors, my wife reading a book about Duan Yongping — Colin Huang’s mentor — and several smart investors who pointed this out to me long ago made me realise I had completely underestimated a long-term tail-end risk for Pinduoduo.

But before getting to that, a quick look at the earnings. Nothing in the numbers should surprise anyone who understands what is actually happening. What is far more interesting, as always with Pinduoduo, is what they don’t say — what is happening behind the curtain.