. Where the money went Costs rose faster than sales. Operating expenses climbed 13 per cent to RMB36.58 billion. Research and development rose 27 per cent to RMB4.57 billion, taking R&D to 4.1 per cent of revenue from 3.5 per cent a year earlier, and administrative costs rose 53 per cent.  “We stepped up our ecosystem investments in the second quarter,” Jun Liu, VP of finance at PDD Holdings, said during the earnings call.  Much of that went on policing the platform. PDD says it has now introduced more than 150 trust-and-safety measures, more than 50 of them in June alone, covering product listings, food and drug safety, merchant qualifications, advertising compliance, intellectual property and livestream selling. It has banned the sale of freshly prepared food and drink outright and tightened what merchants must disclose. It also produced training videos for sellers; one explaining business licence requirements drew 340,000 views in its first day.  What the RMB100 billion is buying The domestic programme PDD keeps returning to is a three-year commitment it describes as building another PDD, funded by an RMB100 billion support scheme.  On the agricultural side, the company says its 2026 premium produce initiative has reached dozens of specialist growing regions, such as Jiangsu aquatic products, Chongqing plums, Hainan pineapple and lychee, Hunan preserved duck and Hubei crayfish. On the manufacturing side, a dedicated supply team has been working through industrial clusters: home textiles in Suzhou, tents in Shaoxing, outdoor goods in Jinhua, cosmetics in Guangzhou, menswear in Xi’an, textiles in Xinjiang. PDD says the support in traffic, data, warehousing and smart manufacturing has halved production cycles at participating factories. The third leg is rural delivery. A free-shipping-to-villages programme launched six months ago now runs across more than 10 provinces and municipalities using county transit hubs and village collection points, with pilot areas in Shandong reporting village order volumes several times higher. A marketplace that sets product standards, funds cold chain, retools factories and runs last-mile logistics into villages is no longer a marketplace. It is competing on capability rather than on price, and it is doing so in exactly the categories – fresh produce, home textiles, outdoor goods – where regional exporters and domestic incumbents make their margin. What was not said Just as revealing was what management did not disclose. There were no user numbers, no gross merchandise value, no geographic or segment breakdown and no mention of Temu, despite co-chief executive Chen Lei describing PDD as sitting at a “unique intersection of global trade” and acknowledging a significant shift in regulatory and compliance conditions since the start of the year. Investors were told a great deal about Hainan pineapples and almost nothing about the international business those remarks were obliquely describing. That silence matters. Temu is central to how investors have understood PDD’s international ambitions. Yet, the earnings call offered little new information about its performance, investment requirements or the impact of the regulatory changes confronting its overseas operations. Instead, the company’s narrative is increasingly centred on a different kind of investment: building deeper control over the domestic ecosystem around its marketplace. Zhao closed by saying high-quality development requires “the intensity of the sprint and, more importantly, the perseverance of a marathon”. Further reading: A US$99m loss, a €3 toll and a valuation halved: Inside Shein’s filing.