Danish labour-market pensions firm Sampension has decided to exclude Chinese e-commerce company PDD Holdings, which owns online marketplace Temu, citing concerns around consumer protection, with the European Commission currently investigating the platform.

Jacob Ehlerth Jørgensen, head of ESG at Sampension, said: “We have now completed our investigation into the investment in PDD Holdings, which owns Temu.”

“Based on the investigation, we assess that there is behaviour by the company that is contrary to our responsibility policy – including in particular a lack of consideration for consumer interests,” he said, adding that Sampension was therefore excluding the company.

The pension provider, and the pension funds it invests on behalf of, have some DKK161m (€21.6m) in PDD Holdings stock, the Copenhagen-based firm said on Thursday.

Sampension said there had been media reports in recent days where Danish pension providers’ investments in PDD Holdings had been criticised.

Ehlerth Jørgensen said that when a company was found to have breached its responsibility policy, the pensions firm had to assess whether that business could be influenced to change its behaviour through dialogue or other forms of active ownership.

“Since the conditions PDD Holdings is being criticised for are a significant and integrated part of the company’s business model, Sampension community’s assessment is that this is not realistic,” he said.

IPE has contacted PDD Holdings for comment.

The European Commission opened formal proceedings at the end of October to assess whether Temu might have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas related to the sale of illegal products, the potentially addictive design of its service, the systems used to recommend purchases to users, and data access for researchers.

The European Union designated Temu as a “very large online platform” at the end of May under the DSA, after the platform declared it had more than 45 million monthly active users in the union – a designation which brought with it obligations including “to duly assess and mitigate any systemic risks stemming from its service”, according to the Commission.

In September, Temu declared its monthly user tally in the region had risen to 92 million.

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Rachel is IPE's Nordic correspondent. She has long been a freelance writer, and over the years, has written for The Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, AMWatch and elsewhere. In 2001, Rachel's personal finance book Kickstart Your Money was published by John Wiley & Sons.View full Profile

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