by Ling Cao

Based on JD Digits’ intelligent city operating system, Nantong city in Jiangsu province has built China’s first modern governance command center. Officials from Nantong showed this achievement to a media delegation on September 22^nd.

This command center can realize digital city management, enabling precise transportation forecast, intelligent monitoring for hazardous chemicals, environmental conditions monitoring and more, in addition to providing visual reports to manage the city.

This center integrates information from different departments across each county in Nantong, helping resolve challenges of cross department governance projects. All of the information can be viewed via big screen as well as conveniently via PC, mobile app and more. If the system detects an abnormal behavior or emergency situations, the center will automatically notify the local department with instructions to manage it.

Xueyi Li, head of the command center said, “Nantong’s digital management, service and decision-making has taken a new step forward through the cooperation, which leverages our innovation in mechanism and JDD’s industry-leading ‘big data + AI’ technologies.”

Dr. Yu Zheng, vice president of JD Digits said, “Based on our city operating system’s ‘One Core, Two Wings’ concept, we hope Nantong will accelerate the upgrade of its intelligence, industrial digitization and provision of convenient life services.” Nantong’s command center is an application example of the “Core” in the “One Core, Two Wings” concept. Zheng added, “The two wings are serving production and consumption.” He explained that through linkage at the base, they further realize the connection and integration of production and marketing. All of these applications will be integrated into the intelligent operating system, enabling a virtuous circle among government-level management, industrial development and improvement of livelihoods.

JDD’s “One Core and Two Wings” Concept

Public emergencies such as floods are a great example of this phenomenon at work. By setting up video at specific points along rivers and sluice gates in the city, the local government can have a holistic view of the situation in real time, instead of having to go to each location, one at a time. This can improve efficiency in terms of response time and personnel deployment.

Another example is the intelligent supervision system for hazardous chemicals. There are over 2,000 hazardous chemicals-related enterprises in Nantong. Challenges such as asymmetric information, unintegrated systems and imperfect mechanisms make comprehensive monitoring difficult. The command center integrates the relevant information from local departments and chemical manufacturers to provide optimal monitoring abilities.

Since launching the system two months ago, it has already dispatched 407 abnormal situation warnings. For example, by monitoring the transportation routes of trucks carrying hazardous chemicals, the system can closely monitor abnormal behavior like sudden prolonged stops or detours, and by analyzing the surrounding environment, can determine the root cause, such as irregular transportation or illegal production. This helps triage issues to the right local department and to provide the right guidelines on handling the issue.

“This command center project represents real application for JDD’s AI and big data-based city governance system. It is not aimed at solving problems for a single department, but rather an innovative application to solve cross department challenges,” Dr. Zheng said.

(ling.cao@jd.com)

by Vivian Yang

JD Digits filed its IPO papers on the Star market in Shanghai on September 11^th. Here is a quick summary of some key figures in its over 400-page prospectus:

The first: JD Digits’ IPO is widely expected to be the biggest digital technology IPO on the Star market. The company adopts a TIE (Technology + Industry + Ecosystem” service model focusing on providing comprehensive digital solutions to businesses. It is the first digital technology provider to join over 4,000 listed companies on China’s A-share market.

RMB 10.327 billion yuan is the revenue JD Digits reported in 1H 2020. In the past three years from 2017 to 2019, its annual revenues were RMB 9.07 billion, RMB 13.616 billion and RMB 18.203 billion respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of 41.6%, a heavy-weight for the one-year-old Star market.

239.05%: Though innovation businesses only account for 5.57% of the total revenues, they grew fast in the past three years with a compound annual growth rate(CAGR) of 239.05%. These emerging businesses mainly target providing digital solutions to city governments and other clients (as opposed to its many merchants and financial institution clients) in the areas of intelligent cities, digital agri-husbandry, digital marketing and more.

Numbers of clients:  Currently JD Digits has 600 financial institution clients including commercial banks, insurance companies, funds, trusts and securities companies. It has served one million small and micro enterprises, 200,000 small and medium-size enterprises and 700 large business centers with its business and technology solutions. In terms of government and other client services, JDD has served more than 40 urban public service organizations with the smart city operating system as its core product. It has a huge IoT marketing platform with over 15 million self-operated and alliance media points, covering more than 300 cities and more than 600 million people.

15.67% is the R&D spending as a percentage of revenue for JD Digits in 1H 2020.This percentage is higher than over 80% of companies listed on the Star market, and makes JDD rank among the top 5% of companies on the A-share market. The company steadily increased its R&D spending, reaching RMB 1.078 billion yuan, RMB 1.743 billion yuan, RMB 2.567 billion yuan respectively in the past three years and RMB 1.619 billion yuan for the first half of 2020 alone.

70%: By June 30^th,2020, among JD Digits’ 9,989 employees, 70% are R&D personnel and staff in technology-related positions. The company targets hiring world-class talent, and so far, has gathered over 40 top-notch scientists from all over the world who work focus on AI and exploring the commercial value of technology and its products. More than 100 top technology experts are leading work on industrial-level applications of cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, knowledge graph, computer vision, voice and natural language processing.

72%: 72% of the funds raised during this IPO will be directly used for technology-related projects, especially for the expansion and upgrading of main business, and continuing to build up its R&D strength to stay ahead of the technological curve.

The post-90s generation: talented young people are the absolute main force for JD Digits. The prospectus showed that over 95.5% of JDD’s employees are born after 1980 with 48.7% of them belong to the post-1990 generation.

And many more “firsts”:  The 400-page prospectus listed a number of JD Digits’ business breakthroughs in its seven years of development. Many of the company’s achievements are also industry milestones, including being the first in China to introduce JD IOU (白条), a credit product on the internet; the first to issue consumer finance ABS; the first to create smart asset management technology solution products; the first to adopt blockchain in ABS issuing; the first to develop intelligent city operating system for China’s cities and more.

(Vivian.Yang@jd.com)

By Martin Li

JD and China Telecom will deepen ongoing cooperation in sharing supply chain resources, building a procurement data system and ensuring emergency supplies during disaster conditions, based on a work meeting on September 21^st . Additionally, the two companies will explore cooperation in standardization of industrial products and standard management.

One aim of the deepened cooperation is to complete a mechanism to ensure the availability and delivery of supplies during emergencies like flooding and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A complete mechanism will be aimed at reducing cost and to speed up supply.

The two will also explore smart operation of supply chain and logistics.

“JD and China Telecom have achieved many innovations in smart procurement,” said Song Chunzheng, vice president of JD.com and president of JD’s enterprise business. “With changes in the market and industry, JD’s enterprise business will keep combining the most advanced technologies and new scenarios, in an effort to expand cooperation and improve related services.”

JD and China Telecom have been cooperating for seven years to improve the B2B procurement path via e-commerce. Their joint efforts have seen procurement time and efficiency decrease from eight days to within three days. By the end of August this year, the cooperation had saw total procurement volumes of over RMB 2.8 billion yuan.

(bjlihao3@jd.com)