On November 18th, JD.com released its unaudited financial results for the three months ended September 30, 2022. Below is an infographic with the key highlights. The full release can be found here.
JD Singles’ Day: Appliance Trade-in Reduces Carbon Emissions
by Doris Liu
Sales of home appliances on JD.com saw an increase of 7 times year-on-year (YOY) in the value of trade-in orders during JD Singles’ Day Grand Promotion (SDGP) this year, in which new products with a Grade 1 energy label purchased through trade-in services are expected to help reduce 80,000 tons of carbon emissions each year.
As a green consumption supporter and promoter, JD.com has consolidated its position in the home appliance sales industry by dint of its supply chain advantages accumulated over 20 years, as well as China’s preferential policies and continuous efforts of brand manufacturers and channels. During the 2022 SDGP, 20 percent of orders for home appliances on JD.com were made through trade-in solutions, marking a delightful result of moving towards a sustainable and low-carbon world.
In 2020, China pledged to achieve a peak in carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060, with all industries advancing their pace of low-carbon transformation, especially the home appliance industry. According to the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s household appliances ownership has exceeded 2.1 billion items, and the scrappage volume in 2022 is estimated at 200 million items. Trading in one major household appliance reduces carbon emissions by 9,763 grams, equivalent to planting a tree, according to the China Beijing Environment Exchange.
As early as 2016, JD.com launched a trade-in service for home appliances, covering more than 95 percent of cities, counties and towns for over 45 recycling categories. In addition, the service can be completed on the same day of order placement to save customers’ time, while also accelerating the penetration of energy-efficient products.
To further optimize customers’ experiences, JD.com offers special subsidies for new purchases made under the trade-in scheme, free dismantling services and free transportation of the old appliances to reduce consumers’ costs and simplify the whole process of upgrading to new green and intelligent home appliances.
During the 2022 SDGP, a service that integrates delivery with installation was chosen 160 percent more than the mid-year 618 Grand Promotion, indicating the growing importance consumers attach to service. To ensure this service, JD.com trained its in-house delivery personnel to become appliance engineers to standardize both delivery and installation services, providing an experience that exceeds consumers’ expectations.
Nearly 10,000 of JD’s engineers have obtained qualification for instant delivery and installation, saving about 6 million hours of consumers’ waiting time for appliance installation.
This year, JD.com also joined hands with the China Green Foundation to launch the “RMB 1 yuan green action with trade-in” public welfare project, gathering all parties in the industry to participate in environmental protection projects. Every time consumers complete one trade-in order, JD will donate RMB 1 yuan for public welfare tree-planting activities. Data shows that JD.com has funded the planting of more than 100,000 trees.
Beer Products See Burgeoning Growth with JD Super
by Mengyang He
JD.com’s omni-channel supermarket, JD Super, recently released its 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion report for beer products, revealing over 50 percent year-on-year growth.
According to the report, craft beer and fruit beer both experienced burgeoning growth, as their transaction volumes rose by over 120 percent and 250 percent year-on-year respectively.
“By providing quality products and leading services in the industry, JD Super has already become the preferable channel for beer and wine lovers,” noted Da Lu, general manager of liquor and alcoholic beverages for JD FMCG omni-channel.
During the Singles’ Day Grand Promotion, sales of the American beer brand Budweiser led other brands, followed by Chinese brands Tsingtao from Shandong and Wusu from Xinjiang.
In addition, JD Super provides consumers with different beer products based on sales data and consumption trends. Craft beer, in comparison with industrial beer, is fresher and has a richer taste, and it now represents the high-end beer market in China.
The report also indicates that fruit beer is often favored by female consumers, and Hoegaarden from Belgium showed a strong performance among all fruit beer products.
JD Cloud Ranks No.1 in World’s Top Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling
by Doris Liu
The model proposed by the team of JD Cloud’s intelligent customer service system, Yanxi (言犀), which provides users with 24/7 service in all scenarios, ranked first among models of MultiWOZ, the world’s top dataset for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue modelling.
Mars, an end-to-end task-oriented dialogue system proposed by the Yanxi team, innovatively models the relationship between dialogue context and dialogue/action state through semantic-aware contrastive learning strategies to ensure a better performance of the system. Empirical results show the proposed Mars system maintains state-of-the-art performance on the MultiWOZ 2.0, CamRest676, and CrossWOZ.
Proposed by the University of Cambridge, MultiWOZ, which is short for the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset, is a fully-labeled collection of human-human written conversations spanning over multiple domains and topics. It is one of the most influential task-based dialogue datasets, containing highly natural conversations between tourists and staff obtained from information centers of tourist cities, in which 70 percent of the dialogue is from 2-5 domains in multiple scenarios, and it is becoming one of the most classic and challenging datasets in the field of natural language processing.
Many prestigious universities and research institutions across the world have participated in the competitive challenge since the release of MultiWOZ, including research groups from Tsinghua University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Microsoft Research, Amazon, DeepMind, and Salesforce.
As part of the challenge, Yanxi participated in end-to-end task-oriented dialogue generation, which needs to first identify the user’s intention through the user dialogue and generate dialogue states, query the database based on the generated dialogue states for entity matching, and then provide natural language responses that meet the user’s goals according to the dialogue policies based on the query database results.As the industry’s first large-scale commercial intelligent customer service system, Yanxi has accumulated rich practices in task-based dialogue generation through support of the entire chain and lifecycle of JD.com’s customer service, with a generation of 10 million dialogues per day on average, serving JD’s over 580 million customers and 178,000 merchants with a smooth experience.
JD Health: Diversified Demands Drove Growth during 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion
by Vivian Yang
During this year’s Singles’ Day Grand Promotion (SDGP) from Oct 31st to November 11th, JD Health saw sales growth in a variety of products and services as demand continues to expand.
Diversified shopping demand
More than 1,600 nutrition products doubled their growth in transaction volume YoY. Transaction volume of mini-sized calcium pills had a six-fold increase YoY, that of liver and eye care products increased two times, behind-the-ear hearing aids jumped 5.9 times, ECG monitors grew 3.7 times, and disability care products increased 3.4 times.
Nearly 10,000 health brands participated in the shopping festival, and many of them used this eye-catching event to introduce new products. Together they collectively launched 160 new SKUs via JD Health this year.
A number of large pharmaceutical brands offering all kinds of medicines for regular, acute, chronic and special diseases, also joined JD Health in the shopping event to provide a one-stop shopping experience for customers. Transaction volume of prepared Chinese Traditional Medicine pieces increased 4.2 times, that of children medicines rose 200 percent; and medicines for hypertension, hyperlipidemia and diabetes all doubled YoY.
Expanded health services from online to offline
Given the high incidence of skin problems during the change of seasons, consultation interactions for dermatologists on JD’s internet hospital exceeded 620,000 times. The number of new users of the “Family Doctor” telemedicine service program quadrupled that of the same period last year.
Connected with more than 60,000 offline drug stores, JD Health’s O2O delivery service is now running day and night in over 400 cities across China. Take Beijing as an example: Over 60 percent of orders made at night between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. can be delivered to customers’ doorsteps within 20 minutes.
Shopping for pets’ health is gaining strong momentum. JD Health upgraded its pet care solutions during the shopping festival, combining both health products and medical services. Transaction volume of non-prescription digestive drugs for pets increased 3.6 times and online veterinarian consultations grew 3.3 times YoY.
Health categories have also become a trendy choice for gifts. The transaction volume of screening services for genetic diseases increased 5.5 times, that of health check-up services for elderly people grew 227 percent, and online orders for medical examination reports analysis rose 3.3 times.
Rising engagement from merchants
JD Health’s medicine procurement service, involving over 400 pharmaceutical makers during this year’s SDGP, supported more than 60,000 small and medium-sized drug stores to reduce procurement costs by an average of 40 percent.
In the meantime, a total of 1,353 online stores on JD Health joined the platform’s charity program through which merchants have an easy channel to make voluntary donations to charitable activities through JD Foundation, with any amount they define or by proportions of their sales. Merchants have made donations more than one million times during the 11-day shopping event.
JD Singles’ Day: Sales of Over 1,100 Brands Double on JD Worldwide
by Doris Liu
More than 1,100 overseas brands and nearly 140 sub-categories of cross-border products on JD Worldwide, JD’s import product platform, saw an over double increase in transaction volume year-on-year (YOY) during JD’s “Peak 28 Hours,” which kicked off at 8:00pm (BJT) on November 10 for the last 28 hours of JD Singles’ Day Grand Promotion.
In the first 10 minutes, transaction volume of the JD National Pavilions on JD Worldwide jumped up by 3.2 times, with duty free business surging over 13 times YOY. Moreover, during the Peak 28 Hours promotion, JD Worldwide’s self-operated stores saw sales rise 10 times compared with one day earlier, while JD’s import supermarket and drink mix category of its national pavilions went up by 7 times respectively.
In terms of skincare consumption, trends have demonstrated that consumers care more and more about ingredients and efficacy, leading the demand for products to be more refined and functional.
During the Peak 28 Hours, hair treatment brands of France’s René Furterer and KÉRASTASE, as well as Australia’s SELSUN rose 29 times, 12 times and 142 percent respectively in transaction volume compared with last year. In addition, beauty device CURRENTBODY, Trilogy Rosehip Oil and UK’s skincare brand ZELENS were up 8, 2 and 3 times respectively.
Sales of imported digital products and home appliances surged dramatically, with categories of computers, camera products and gaming equipment up 5 times, 158 percent and 125 percent compared with last year during the Peak 28 Hours. The top 3 best-selling digital products on JD Worldwide during the period were the Disc & Digital Edition of Sony PlayStation®5 PS5 Console (Japanese Edition), AirPods Pro (2nd generation) and white Nintendo Switch (Japanese Version).
In-depth: Eight Categories of Value Revealed in 2022 Singles’ Day Consumption Trends in China
by Vivian Yang and Doris Liu
JD.com reported a new record in transactions during the 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion (SDGP), which ended at midnight on Friday, November 11. The 11-day shopping festival was participated in by an increased number of users and achieved higher-than-industry growth rate, manifesting the vitality and big potential of China’s consumption market.
“The ongoing trend of a consumption upgrade is mainly reflected in people’s consumption structure and improvement in industrial efficiency,” said Hui Liu, director of JD’s Consumption and Industry Development Research Institute, at the 2022 SDGP media open day on November 11.
Hui Liu at media open day of JD.com’s 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion
Liu stated that the next phase of China’s consumption growth will be driven by deeper connections between merchants and consumers, and among all participants along the industrial chain, including online and offline sellers, industrial belts, farmers and more. JD’s sales data revealed that they are collectively generating value in the following eight dimensions:
1. Time value: the long-termism of consumption
Consumers have cooled down on spur-of-the-moment purchases, instead enthusiastically investing in products that can bring high-value and long-term returns, such as products for health, fitness and education, as well as services that help save their own time.
JD Health’s SDGP data showed that more than 1,600 nutrition brands doubled their YoY transaction volume, and online consultations with JD Pet Health increased 3.3 times. Over the past five years, service consumption has been expanding from family needs, to sports, health, pet care and more scenarios. Sales of life-related services increased 30 times, that of car maintenance grew 20 times, and bookings for health services were up by 7 times.
Noticeably, JD’s 30-day price guarantee program, which promises price difference return upon request in order to free users from the hassles of comparing prices and snapping coupons, was accessed more than 500 million times in JD’s App during this year’s SDGP.
JD Pharmacy enables convenient health products delivery from offline drug stores
2. Environmental value: rising consciousness of responsible consumption
Keyword searches of “energy-saving,” “green,” “low-carbon,” “organic” and others alike surged dramatically on JD.com. This May, JD launched the “Green Impact Initiative,” which made nearly a million kinds of products on its platform more identifiable with environmentally-friendly labels.
JD Home Appliances’ highly welcomed trade-in services reached seven-fold YoY growth in number of orders. It also means that during this SDGP, every 2 out of 10 home appliances orders on JD.com enjoyed this service. Many users traded in their old washing machines or fridges in exchange for upgraded appliances, or even cross-category choices, primarily smart phones or watches.
JD Logistics estimated that during this SDGP, its green supply chain operations reduced a total of 200,000 tons of carbon, which involves 9 million uses of recyclable packages – avoiding approximately 80,000 tons of one-off packaging waste. One hundred million product packages were delivered with their original packaging boxes from the factories in collaboration with more than 20,000 brand partners. The company also engaged its end-users to raise awareness of green logistics throughout the SDGP.
A JD courier is delivering products with a recyclable “Green Stream Box”
3. Cultural value: “China-chic” inspired by traditional culture
The phenomenon of “China-chic” has been a booming trend among Chinese Gen-Z. According to JD’s data, over the past four years, merchants featuring “China-chic“ increased 240 percent, the amount of products increased 99 percent and new brands under this category grew by 68 percent. On the consumer’s side, shoppers of these products increased 90 percent, and sales were up by 284 percent.
SDGP data shows that sales of products with “China-chic” elements increased 124 percent YoY. On the super day of J Shop during SDGP, JD’s omni-channel fashion and lifestyle business, the transaction volume of wristwatches with Chinese art designs rose more than five times YoY.
In the cosmetics category, 299 brands achieved transaction growth of more than 10 times YoY, and 952 brands more than doubled their transactions, of which 239 are domestic brands.
The J Shop in Xi’an
4. Emotional value: shopping in pursuit of positive feelings
Products and services that can serve as sources of comfort, exquisiteness, pleasure and similar good feelings are well received in the Chinese market.
Take rocking chairs and lazy sofas as examples. They maintained annual growth rates at 77 and 56 percent respectively over the past five years. Meanwhile, sleep-inducing products such as scented candles and aromatherapy steam eye masks have wooed many young customers.
During SDGP, more than 200 trending categories that satisfy such needs achieved more than 100 percent sales growth YoY, including ready-to-cook food, hi-tech kitchenware, warm-protection outfit, regimen products, chic skiing equipment, e-sports gears, and more.
JD’s 24/7 Service Centre is in full operation for 2022 SDGP
5. Exploratory value: hidden skills unlocked by consumption
Consumers, instead of simply following the latest trends or updates, tend to try new products to satisfy their curiosity and explore more possibilities from purchases. For instance, the rise of home organizing explores the reasonable use of limited space, while the popularity of ready-to-cook food inspires consumers to explore cooking and food appreciation.
New products are a key driving force for overall consumption, with 79 percent of consumers expressing strong interest in them, according to JD’s data. Notably, the transaction volume growth of new products is always faster than the overall increase of the category to which the product belongs. The new product transaction volume of mobile phones, computers and digital products accounted for more than 70 percent, and the categories of food and lifestyle also saw a significant increase in new product transactions.
The proportion of new product orders from JD Little Rubik’s Cube, a marketing channel to promote new products, in the overall orders went up 3.3 times in 2022 SDGP, with the conversion rate of new product orders up 3.7 times compared with last year, which is 26 percent higher than the overall conversion rate.
Fresh supply from JD’s soilless “vegetable factory” to 7Fresh supermarket
6. Value of a positive circle: quality improvement + agriculture promotion in rural revitalization
Premium products with geographic indications (GIs) from all over China have not only upgraded consumers’ dining quality, but have also effectively raised farmers’ income. With the advantages of supply chain, JD.com has built a model of direct sourcing from the origin to reduce cost and improve efficiency, creating a positive cycle formed by high-quality agricultural products from the supply side and consumption upgrade from the demand side.
JD’s data shows that the continuous infrastructure improvement in rural areas and the development of technology have bolstered the share of online sales of GI products to over 10 percent of the overall agricultural products in transaction volume, indicating an obvious consumption trend and a sustainable path for high-quality agricultural products.
During this year’s SDGP, nearly 10,000 kinds of agricultural products exceeded RMB 100,000 yuan in transaction volume, and about 30 percent of grain, oil, tea and other primary processing agricultural products achieved more than 100 percent growth.
Livestreaming onsite in a coffee beans farm in Yunnan province supported by JD.com
7. Value for integration: Omni-channel reshaping retail industry
By merging the borders of online and offline shopping, the omni-channel retailing model extensively integrates physical and digital channels, resources and capabilities to bring the ultimate experience to consumers while stimulating greater consumer potential.
At the moment, tens of thousands of physical stores are under JD’s management, including 15,000 JD home appliance stores and other new businesses, such as the J Shop, which focuses on fashion and lifestyle. JD’s supply chain has been connected to 3.67 million offline stores in China, with its on-demand retail covering nearly 400 cities nationwide, substantially enhancing the digitalization and fulfillment capability of brick-and-mortar stores.
Additionally, JD Malls, JD Super Experience Stores and JD home appliance flagship stores, which offer traditional electronic categories as well as home, furniture and products, saw transaction volume jump up by 140 percent YOY. Meanwhile, sales at JD’s physical lifestyle stores increased by 4 times during the 2022 SDGP.
A JD Mall in Shenyang of Liaoning province powered by Dada Now’s on-demand delivery services
8. Value for inclusiveness: continuing to boost the real economy
While ensuring the stability and efficiency of JD’s own supply chain, the company is opening up its capabilities to external partners to share universal value in a larger industrial ecosystem and help traditional industries upgrade digitally.
It has partnered with more than 2,000 brands for C2M (customer to manufacturer). Furthermore, 620,000 smart decisions were made by JD’s intelligent supply chain system covering replenishment and allocation to fulfillment and more during JD’s 618 Grand Promotion this year, realizing an intelligent supply chain collaboration with suppliers of 81.2 percent of self-operated stores.
JD is bringing Jingdezhen ceramics and porcelain with new demand and development opportunities
As a new type of real economy-based enterprise, JD.com will continue to provide solid and stable supply chain technology and services to its partners in the real economy, promoting rural revitalization, manufacturing upgrade and offline retail development to create concrete value for all industries.
Lijun Xin, CEO of JD Retail elaborated on the company’s role in the real economy
As JD Retail’s CEO Lijun Xin said in the beginning of SDGP this year, “JD.com has real economy DNA, by virtue of our people, warehouses and products across the world. JD.com will always be an integral part along with our partners in building value for the growth of the real economy.”
JD.com’s Record-breaking 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion Reflects Robust Consumption Vitality
JD.com’s record-breaking 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion came to its end at 24:00 on November 11, concluding the 11-day promotion which started at 8 pm on October 31. Growth rate exceeded the industry average. Since last year, JD.com began kicking off the promotion 4 hours before midnight, allowing consumers to place orders without having to pull an all-nighter.
During this Singles’ Day stint, high quality products and big brands have become consumers’ favored choices across product categories. In the first minute of JD Singles’ Day “Peak 28 Hours” starting at 8 pm on November 10, Apple saw transaction volume jump over RMB 1 billion yuan. In these first ten minutes, transaction volume of gaming TVs, fresh air ACs, and self-cleaning sweeping robots increased 100% year on year. Transaction volume of XR glasses and XBOX increased three times. Transaction volume of top fashion brands from LVMH Group including BVLGARI, CELINE, FENDI, and LOEWE increased 18 times. At the same time, transaction volume of 87 international beauty brands increased 200%, and over 500 international brands on JD Worldwide, JD’s import product platform, increased over 100%.
“We have partnered with JD.com for 19 premium brands in the categories of fashion clothing, bags, jewelry, watches, wines and spirits, perfumes and cosmetics. During this year alone, we have added 10 key brands to the collaboration,” said Andrew Wu, LVHM Group President of Greater China. “Congratulations to JD.com for its continuous progress.”
Sales data reflects growth in shopping confidence, with consumers continuing to pursue solid products, prices and services. During the whole Singles’ Day promotion, JD’s price guarantee service was clicked over 500 million times, eradicating consumers’ worries about price changes over 30 days.
Consumption on new products continues to grow, and new users are vitalizing the market. JD.com provided nearly 20 million new items this Singles’ Day, with the total transaction volume increasing 1.57 times compared with the same period in October, of which half achieved a month-on-month growth rate of over 200%. According to JD.com’s data, the best-selling new products fall under the categories of cell phones, laptops, washing machines, refrigerators and flat TVs. As for new users, customers aged under 35 account for 63 percent of the total new customers on JD.com.
Consumption in mid- and lower-tier markets has grown healthily. Average basket size from new lower-tier market consumers increased 12% year on year. Consumers in these markets also buy electronics and home appliances more often. Transaction volume of home appliances in fifth- and sixth-tier cities increased 97 percent compared with last year. During the promotion, transaction volume of nearly 10,000 kinds of agricultural products surpassed RMB 100,000 yuan, with 23 percent of fresh produce realizing 100% growth rate in sales.
JD.com also actively promotes the green consumption concept. Since the beginning of 2022 until now, JD Home Appliance’s trade-in service has helped reduce 262,000 tons of carbon emissions.
“This Singles’ Day, JD.com further increased its investment in optimizing the ecosystem, lowering operations costs and improving service guarantees, to help brands and merchants, especially SMEs, seize growth opportunities,” said Lijun Xin, CEO of JD Retail. In the first 28 hours starting at 8 pm on October 31, transaction volume of nearly 50,000 small and medium-sized brands and 70,000 small and medium-sized merchants increased 100 percent. Consumer-to-Manufacturer (C2M) enables partners to embrace fast growth and reduce product launch time by 67%. Transaction volume of C2M-based products increased 32.7 times this Singles’ Day.
Additionally, more than 200,000 nationwide physical stores launched on JDDJ and Shop Now, an increase of 100 percent compared with last Singles’ Day, to offer on-demand retail service with one-hour delivery to consumers.
Behind the scenes, thanks to JD’s self-owned 1,400+ warehouses, smart supply chain and logistics infrastructure, hundreds of delivery robots and so on, customer orders are being processed swiftly to be delivered to customers’ doorsteps nationwide.