Imported Fresh Food Sales Explode During Spring Festival

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The Year of the Rooster began with a bang at JD.com, with total sales and fulfilled orders during the Spring Festival period both doubling compared to last year. Imported fresh produce was a major breakout category with sales increasing 14-fold compared with 2016. Powered by JD’s cold chain logistics network, the company delivered diverse produce from around the world, including lobsters from North America, kiwifruit from Australia and avocados from Mexico to dining tables across the country for the biggest Chinese holiday of the year.

In the months leading up to the Spring Festival, JD.com’s sourcing team of almost 200 experts worked tirelessly to seek out the best produce from around the world. Fresh imported cherries were a major draw. To source the best cherries, which are at their peak in the Southern Hemisphere, the team worked extensively with top-tier cherry farms in Chile, Australia and New Zealand. As a result, JD.com’s Cherry Super Product Day on January 13 saw over 10 million cherries from the three countries sold on that day alone.

JD.com’s sourcing team of almost 200 experts worked tirelessly to seek out the best produce from around the world. JD.com’s Cherry Super Product Day on January 13 saw over 10 million cherries from the three countries sold on that day alone.

Other popular imported fresh produce sold during the Spring Festival included shrimp and beef, which accounted for nearly half of total imported fresh produce sales. Premium prawns from Argentina and Ecuador were especially prized by customers. Beef from Australia, New Zealand and Uruguay also all proved exceptionally popular.

“Chinese Spring Festival is always a time for traditional food, but there has been a huge surge in families looking to add international variety to their tables,” said Xiaosong Wang, President of JD.com’s Fresh Food Business Unit. “In the three weeks leading up to this year’s Spring Festival, sales of fresh produce from the US increased eight-fold versus a year ago, with sales of American lobsters up over 15-fold. This year, JD.com’s sourcing team will continue to travel the world to bring even more exciting imported food to Chinese tables.”

JD.com’s efficient logistics network operated without interruption throughout the Spring Festival holiday, providing same and next-day delivery service in 110 cities and fresh produce in 69 cities nationwide, reaching Heihe city of Heilongjiang province in the north and Sansha City in the southern Hainan Province.

The company expects to see a continued boom in imported food sales as Chinese palates become more sophisticated, and customers become increasingly aware of the breadth of JD.com’s free food offering.

JD Kuaidi Raps in Ode to his Colleagues

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JD.com’s delivery team, who are company employees, are ubiquitous throughout China. Easily recognizable in their red jackets, whether on foot or driving the company’s red scooters, trucks or cars, they are well known to online shoppers across the country.

These “kuaidi,” or deliverymen, are also committed to their customers and passionate about their mission. To share his feelings about the upcoming Spring Festival holiday — a time when most Chinese businesses are shut, but JD will be delivering as usual — one delivery man recently created an unusual Chinese rap video. On his own time, he made the video to share his enthusiasm and make sure his customers and others know that JD will be open and that he and his teammates will be delivering packages with speeds unparalleled in the industry.

Zhihong Yang, who is in charge of the delivery station in Xuanwei, Yunnan Province, manages a team of nine. Together they are responsible for getting orders out to customers in all the villages and towns across Xuanwei county. Some of them appear in the video, along with local customers and many actual scenes of Yang’s delivery territory and home province of Yunnan.

Zhihong originally got into American music listening to Michael Jackson. When he got into rap, Nas and Tupac were among his favorites. Below is Zhihong’s video that he made himself.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3_iCbjPPydU

Punctuated by lyrics that highlight JD’s unparalleled service and the rapid speed of JD’s deliveries, he raps about the jungles, fortresses and ancient cities of Yunnan, where “JD red” can be seen. He also sings the praises of the many items customers can buy, including a variety of foods that can be “steamed, fried, boiled, deep-fried, shallow-fried or braised with soy sauce.”

He raps about the heroic delivery man, “that trusted guy who crosses mountains and rivers to send parcels to you … that guy who always smiles, whether burning sun or cold winter…through streets and lanes, all the day and through the night, walking across the farm, service is all.”

Is it a bit campy? Sure. But his passion is genuine and it’s pretty impressive that he put together the song and the video all on his own—all while holding down a job making sure all of his thousands of packages all get there with blazing-fast speed.

JD Delivering Through Chinese New Year, Connecting Logistics Staff with Family

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With the Chinese Spring Festival holiday approaching, people throughout China prepare to celebrate the New Year festival with family and friends. For some families, the week-long holiday is the only time during the year when they can all be together, as those who left rural areas to work in the cities travel home to reunite with children, spouses, loved ones and friends, and others travel from the countryside to the cities or distant towns where their loved ones work.

In recent years this period has seen what’s been estimated to be the largest human migration on the planet. In 2016, for example, an estimated 3 billion individual trips took place during Spring Festival week, with trains, planes, highways and roads jammed to capacity on many days.

With this much movement across the country, travel becomes challenging. Government offices and most businesses shut down as people enjoy their time off.

Most e-commerce companies also shut down, or they abandon normal delivery commitments and tack on extra fees. JD.com, however, decided years ago to continue supporting its customers during the holiday, delivering to families enjoying the festivities together without the delays or added fees. Consumers can get standard same- and next-day delivery, a level of service that other companies can’t match even during slow periods, much less during the biggest holiday of the year. This allows people to bring gifts to their families or even to have packages shipped directly to them throughout the holiday.

JD.com can do this because it operates its own warehouses, delivery vehicles and end-to-end logistics systems, and because its delivery team is staffed by its own employees.

Since most delivery staff also have families, and many are far removed from one another throughout much of the year, JD took steps several years ago to help ease the burden for those who work during the holiday to make the lives of our customers better. For example, CEO Richard Liu announced a policy in 2014 to give employees who live apart from their children a special cash payment of RMB 3,000 if they have a child, and an additional RMB 3,000 if they have more than one so that the children can travel to visit their parents during Spring Festival holiday. There are also provisions to claim a higher amount if expenses exceed that. The program was extended to childless employees so that they can get an extra stipend for their hard work during the holiday since many of them have to spend it apart from their loved ones as well.

Since the program launched in 2014, JD has spent around RMB 200 million to help over 20,000 JD employees enjoy time with their families during the holidays.

“I miss my family so much and I was disappointed when I didn’t think I would see them on Chinese New Year’s Eve,” said Yan Yong, a deliveryman at JD’s Temple of Heaven station in Beijing. “But then I learned about the company’s program to help my children come join me in Beijing and felt much happier. I got to see them and my customers will still get their packages on time!”

Yan Yong, a deliveryman at JD’s Temple of Heaven station in Beijing.

While the expense to the company is not insignificant, JD.com thinks it’s money well spent if its employees can enjoy at least some time with their families and its customers can continue to rely on the company for all their online shopping needs — even when most other businesses are closed.

JD Ideal Marketing Solution Launches, Giving Brands Unprecedented Targeting Resources

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One of Quaker brand’s best-selling new products of 2016 in China achieved great success by leveraging the strengths of JD marketing tools.

When one of the most successful global brands wanted to create a product that would resonate with Chinese consumers, it got creative. Rather than simply trying to transfer products that have been successful in other markets, Quaker decided to leverage insights from data gathered from JD’s 200 million active consumers, its sophisticated supply chain management system, and its knowledge of niche market segmentation to identify an underserved piece of the market. The result was a hugely successful breakfast drink.

JD and Quaker had robust collaboration for the launch of Quaker High-Fiber Oats Dairy Drink to the Chinese market. The two sides closely studied JD consumers’ profiles and their varied preferences, executed well-rounded consumer communications and sales promotions during the go-to-market activities, and leveraged strategic resources in media-to-shelf and sales campaigns. Quaker High-Fiber Oats Dairy Drink was an instant hit, receiving impressive sales and voice-of-share on the market.

For brands working with JD.com, the Quaker example is just a taste of what they will be able to achieve as JD has used experiences like this to develop a game-changing marketing solution.

The JD Ideal Marketing Solution helps address one of the most critical marketing challenges facing brands today – how to build and sustain engagement with consumers in an increasingly fragmented media environment.

According to Global Web Index’s research, consumers now have an average of 3.64 devices, and are consuming media across a multitude of apps and platforms. With information and insight on consumer habits increasingly dispersed and silo-ed, marketers face a host of new difficulties.

They are looking for ways to get comprehensive insight in customers’ shopping habits, influence their decisions, how they can influence purchasing decisions, and how they can get the access, data and insight they need to make efficient marketing decisions. That’s where JD.com comes in.

JD Ideal Marketing Solution allows brands to tap into the vast data, insights and marketing tools that JD.com uses to engage with its consumers across China, and to connect these resources to enable better returns on marketing investment.

Just as Quaker used JD.com’s consumer insight to design and launch new products, the JD Ideal Marketing Solution will give other brands all the tools they need to build stronger engagement with consumers in China.

The launch of the solution is a key step in JD’s strategy to open its resources to partners to develop brand loyalty and tailor products to customers. The beauty of working with JD.com on these efforts is that, in addition to the company’s massive amount of data on consumer habits on its own site, it can leverage a vast wealth of complementary data from additional sources.

For example, the JD-Tencent partnership gives brands access not only to JD’s 200 million consumers, but also to the roughly one billion monthly users on Tencent’s dominant social media platforms WeChat and Mobile QQ.

In the last few days alone, JD.com’s brand partners, including 3M, Be & Cherry and Tian Wang, have all worked with JD to leverage Tencent’s platforms by becoming some of the first brands to launch their own dedicated JD flagship stores on WeChat through Tencent’s revolutionary new mini program feature.

JD Ideal Marketing Solution goes live from today. It should be a game changer for brands trying to develop effective marketing strategies in a media environment that is increasingly diffuse.

23 Top Brands Participate in JD.com’s First “Super Brand Day Bonanza”

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To celebrate the first anniversary of JD.com’s inaugural Super Brand Day campaign, JD.com launched its first Super Brand Day Bonanza, just in time for the Chinese New Year. On January 10, 23 major international and domestic brands offered big discounts to JD.com shoppers. Participating companies, all of which held Super Brand Days on JD in 2016, cover categories including digital products, food and beverage, apparel and shoes, and baby and maternal products. Coca Cola, Dell, LG, Philips and Wyeth, as well as fast-growing Chinese brands like Haier, Huawei, Xiaomi and others are among the brands participating this year.

For the Super Brand Day Bonanza, each company offered up to 50% discounts on select top-selling products and popular items, with individual live 30-minute web celebrity broadcasts on the JD.com mobile app to engage with fans.

Since JD.com launched the first Super Brand Day in January 2016, these bi-weekly campaigns, each featuring a well-known brand, have become an integral part of how we help our partners build name recognition and brand loyalty. Mobilizing our resources across marketing, logistics, big data, financing and operations, JD.com provides promotional support during each campaign to ensure wide brand exposure and help lower marketing costs. Going beyond marketing, we tap into our extensive databases of consumer shopping behaviors to help brands better understand consumer trends, strategically price products and deploy inventory in different areas, target the ideal potential shoppers, and deepen consumer engagement.

While JD sees massive traffic on sales like Singles Day and our Anniversary sale in June, Super Brand Days are an effective way for individual brands to stand out rather than competing with thousands of others for consumer attention. For brands, the advantage of participating in the Super Brand Day campaign is clear: all participants have either increased their sales or significantly raised brand awareness—usually achieving both goals.

For example, LG has long been well known in China for its electronic products. But by participating in a Super Brand Day promotion, LG was also able to showcase its other popular healthcare and cosmetic brands, such as The Face Shop and Whoo, which consumers were not aware are part of LG Group. JD.com provided deep resources to gauge the interest of the potential consumers and create traffic, including providing eye-catching positions on JD.com, creating tailor-made home pages for the desktop site, native app and WeChat shopping channel. Additionally we jointly developed social media campaigns, as well as on- and off- line advertisements. For LG, sales were 1.6 times that of 2015 Singles Day—typically the biggest sales day of the year for brands.

Another example of success is Dell. Through its cooperation with JD.com, Dell went beyond their traditional promotional strategies to incorporate innovative new tactics, including a pre-sales “warmup,” in-depth interaction with consumers and precisely targeted promotions. The results were clear: sales were over four times that of 2015 Singles Day, and broke the daily sales record for Dell products on JD.com, with over 100,000 computers and displays sold. Dell also used the campaign to launch a new series of laptops, made exclusively for JD.com users. The new series received over a million pre-orders, the highest number ever on the JD.com platform.

“JD.com’s Super Brand Day increased interest among online users in the Dell brand and this boosted the sales of our products significantly,” said Chang Dai, Director of E-commerce sales and operation at Dell. “We look forward to building our partnership with JD.com, exploring mutually beneficial cooperation of resources and promotion as we join hands to host future major marketing galas.”

To keep bringing JD.com users the best online shopping experience in China, we’ve launched two new promotions in addition to the Super Brand Days. Super Category Day promotes products by various brands in a single category and Super Product Day promotes one highly popular item, such as Lenovo’s YOGA Book.

As Chinese consumers become more and more sophisticated, their demand for high-quality products and service continues to rise—especially among millennials, who have become China’s major shopping force. These Super Brand Days are proving to be a game-changer for brands looking to introduce or re-engage with key audiences like these.

2016 Super Brand Day Results for Selected Brands

JD Finance and China UnionPay to Cooperate on Payment Solutions

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JD Finance is teaming up with China UnionPay, which has more branded bank cards in circulation than all other companies in the world, to develop a wide-ranging suite of innovative financial solutions for the Chinese market. The two will cooperated across a range of sectors, including online payment solutions, co-branded credit cards, and rural financing programs. We will also work together in areas such as risk control, rural e-commerce, big data analysis, and opportunities in international markets. As part of the agreement, JD.com will become a member of China UnionPay’s acquirer network.

The agreement, which was signed today, witnessed by China UnionPay President Shi Wenchao and JD Finance CEO Chen Shengqiang, will cover a number of critical areas

Over the last decade, China has gone from a largely cash-driven society, to one of the most sophisticated and digitally-enabled payment markets in the world. The cooperation between two of the largest players in China’s financial sector marks a major step forward in the country’s ongoing development in the area.

The agreement, which was signed today, witnessed by China UnionPay President Shi Wenchao and JD Finance CEO Chen Shengqiang, will cover a number of critical areas. In the immediate term, JD Finance will begin working with China UnionPay on initiatives to enhance the online shopping experience for users in China. This will include developing new innovations in contactless and online payments, and co-branded credit cards with commercial banks in China.

In the coming months, JD Finance and China UnionPay will also work together in areas such as risk analysis and control. JD Finance has some of the most sophisticated risk control systems in the industry. Leveraging JD.com’s vast array of transaction and customer data JD Finance has built complex credit and risk management models. Integrating this with China UnionPay’s industry-leading transaction management platforms, will make payments and financing safer, easier, and more convenient for both consumers and businesses.

Established in 2013, JD Finance is the financial technology arm of JD.com. The business unit gives individuals and businesses quick, easy and convenient access to the financial services they need. Taking advantage of JD.com’s proprietary data resources, e-commerce expertise and industry-leading risk control systems, JD Finance offers sophisticated financial solutions in areas including consumer credit, supply chain financing, asset management, payment solutions and crowdfunding.

In November, JD.com announced that it would explore the possibility of reorganizing JD Finance so that it would have entirely domestic ownership, which would enable it to apply for licenses in the sector that have that requirement.

JD.com Sees Record Orders and Sales Volume for Singles Day

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Mobile continues to be the main access point for shopping with JD.com

The Singles Day shopping festival draws to a close with JD.com customers having placed record numbers of orders. On November 11 alone, our total transaction volume increased 59% versus the same day last year, while for the November 1-11 period it increased by 60%. We plan to incorporate finalized GMV into our normal quarterly reporting for the fourth quarter.

Mobile continues to be the main access point for shopping with JD.com, with 85% of our orders on Nov 11 coming through mobile devices. Our native app, WeChat and Mobile QQ shopping entry points, and the JD mobile website all received very strong traffic during the period.

This year we extended our home grown logistics network beyond our self-operated warehouses, delivery vehicles and delivery staff, with the expanded use of drones to speed package delivery to rural customers. After successful drone deliveries in four areas of China, we plan to expand this program to rural customers in more areas starting next year, bringing the advantages of ecommerce to more and more people. By the end of 2017, we expect to have more than 100 regular drone routes for rural customers.

Some notable fact and figures from the 11-day sales period include:

  ·  Apparel and home furnishings sold strongly, accounting for 40% of total orders on JD Mall

  ·  42.5 million cellphones, office products and digital products were sold, including 650,000 laptops and 500,000 desktop PCs and some 4.34 million cellphones

  ·  Fresh foods saw sales increase 1,000% over the same period last year, with Argentine red shrimp and seafood from Southeast Asia proving particularly popular

  ·  The company sold 20 million books

  ·  1.1 million pairs of sports shoes sold on JD.com

Additional one-day facts and figures from November 11 include:

  ·  Guess had 70 times the number of orders that it has on a typical day

  ·  Lee’s orders increased 43-fold compared to Singles Day last year

  ·  Tumi orders increased 20-fold compared to Singles Day last year

Read more about the JD.com rural drone program and follow us on Twitter: @JD_Spokesman

JD.com’s Drone Delivery Program Takes Flight in Rural China

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This Singles Day, JD.com is using innovative drone technology to speed deliveries to consumers in some of China’s remote areas, enabling them to participate more fully in the annual Singles Day sales festival.

We are deploying drones to extend our delivery and logistics network, starting with four rural locations of China in the outskirts of Beijing and in the provinces of Jiangsu, Shaanxi and Sichuan. (Factsheet; B-roll and photos for media use) We believe we are the first e-commerce company in the world to put drone technology into this kind of commercial use.

Our drone infrastructure was developed by our research and logistics innovation lab, JDX, which is focused on developing smart logistics solutions to make the passage of goods from warehouses to our customers ever quicker, cheaper and more efficient.

JD.com is proud of its home-grown delivery and logistics system, which is unequalled anywhere and provides fast delivery to virtually every city in China and many areas outside the cities—including same- and next-day delivery to an area with a population of more than 600 million. However, in the more remote areas where the terrain is complex and infrastructure is poor, last-mile logistics can be challenging, and this can make the overall online shopping experience more difficult and less satisfying than JD customers have come to expect from us.

  

The JD Drone program was born to address this challenge. It has been designed as a cost-effective, scalable, safe and reliable way to bring new opportunities to remote rural communities in China that are currently underserved by the e-commerce industry. The program works by dispatching orders from regional delivery stations to JD’s network of dedicated “village promoters” in each village, who then distribute the orders directly to customers, significantly shortening delivery times and reducing logistics costs. JD.com currently has more than 300,000 village promoters across the country.

Many rural residents have traditionally had far fewer buying choices than their urban counterparts. That’s because they could purchase goods only from local stores, where they often find higher prices than are typically seen in the cities, and where counterfeit goods remain an issue. Rural villages are impacted by a series of challenges, including the high logistics expenses of getting products to the local stores, and the fact that store owners are averse to stocking items that will have slow turnover given the smaller populations. The result is that the very people who have less disposable income, end up facing higher prices, while having to accept limited product selection.

Now, with the JD drone delivery program in place, shopping online offers rural consumers unprecedented new opportunities to have authentic products from around the globe delivered right to their door more quickly. We are working to ensure that even rural villagers can enjoy the same advantages of e-commerce—namely product quality, selection and price—that their counterparts in Chinese cities enjoy.

  

HOW IT WORKS

This Singles Day, JD Drones will serve customers in a number of rural locations across the country.

In Jiangsu Province, for example, drones will be dispatched from the Tiantong’an delivery station in Suqian to communities such as Hanzha village in the surrounding countryside.

Controlled by a proprietary, highly sophisticated back-end system, the drone can then take off automatically and follow a pre-determined route to the village that is designed to optimize delivery time and cost.

When it arrives at the village, the drone lands at a designated drop-off point, where our local village promoter takes delivery. The village promoters, chosen in part for their familiarity with the residents and the layout of their villages, then ensure that the orders reach JD.com’s customers in the area.

OUR DRONE TECHNOLOGY

The JD drone system is powered by an automated infrastructure system that is seamlessly integrated into our own logistics system and was developed and patented by our own JDX team.

Research on the program began in October 2015 and pilot trips were launched in June 2016.Since then the JDX team has successfully completed thousands of test flights.

We now have five models and a fleet of more than 30 drones in operation, all of which were designed and engineered by our JD team and built to our specifications to meet our unique needs. Designed for safety and stability, our drones can transport and deliver packages weighing between five kilos and 15 kilos and cover distances as far as 50 kilometers.

JD.com Drone Factsheet Printable Version