Pinduoduo posted a 51% gain in third-quarter revenue with research and development spending climbing to a record.

Revenue for the three months ended September climbed to 21.5 billion yuan ($3.3 billion), while notching a second consecutive quarter of profit, the Nasdaq-listed company said on Friday. 

The 34% increase in R&D expenses and third-straight quarterly decline in sales and marketing spending has taken place under the watch of Chen Lei, who took over as Chief Executive Officer last July and was appointed Chairman in March. The company is transitioning to a different phase of development marked by stable operations, after achieving the unprecedented feat of garnering 800 million customers in under six years earlier this year.  

"We are already serving 867.3 million users. To leverage on our strength of having management with years of engineering training, we have been increasing our R&D investments," Chen said on a conference call with analysts. "This is a shift in strategy from our first five years when we were focusing much more on sales and marketing."

Much of the investment will focus on tech-enabled agricultural solutions to address critical needs in the sector, Chen said. They include bringing more agricultural products and communities into the digital economy, and further improving the efficiency of the agricultural supply chain to meet user demand and reduce waste, he said.

Agriculture in China is still marked by a lower level of digitization compared with other sectors. Productivity is also lagging behind, with uneven adoption of technology by smallholder farmers. At the same time, the agricultural labor pool is aging and shrinking. 

Chen has previously highlighted food quality and logistics as two areas where Pinduoduo is devoting its resources to spearhead change. Pinduoduo's direct access to consumers and millions of merchants and farmers has placed the company in a unique position to provide innovators a proving ground for their technology solutions, he has said. 

One such initiative is the annual Smart Agriculture Competition, a precision farming contest that brings together young talent from different disciplines to develop cost-effective and environmentally friendly technology for smallholder farmers in China. Pinduoduo also has research partnerships to study the health impact of eating plant-based proteins and develop low-cost tests for pesticide residues. 

"Trained as engineers, my team and I have devoted ourselves to finding technology solutions to implement across the agriculture supply chain," Chen said on Friday. "We have only scratched the surface after six years. There is still much more for us to do in agriculture, especially with technology."