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by Kelly Dawson and Vivian Yang

Despite a significant impact to domestic tourism under COVID-19 in the first half of 2020, travel in China has steadily gained momentum in recent months.

To capitalize on that momentum and improve the user experience for consumers who are increasingly turning to online channels to book flights, hotels and vacation activities, JD.com announced in August that it has partnered with leading travel services provider Trip.com to integrate the two platforms.

In a continuation of that partnership, JD Retail CEO Lei Xu and Trip.com’s co-founder and Chairman Liang Jianzhang hosted a joint live-streaming event for Trip.com’s 21^st anniversary on October 28^th. It was the first time the two companies co-hosted a livestream, and also the first time Xu joined a livestreamed event for travel products.  

Over 5.7 million people wathced the livestream during its peak time. Data showed that the sales of  hotels on JD Travel on the day increased by 776% compared with the same period last year.

To entertain the audience during the livestream, Liang cosplayed the Monk Tang (唐僧), a leading character in China’s classic novel “Journey to the West”, who Liang referred to as a symbol of the most experienced traveler. In response, Xu chose another famous character in the same novel, High Lord (太上老君), who always held a fan in his hand.

“As we all know, the tourism industry was one of the most hard-hit businesses in the first half of the year,” Xu said. “I’m here today to fan the flames for the sales of Ctrip’s travel products.”

Liang replied with compliments for the e-commerce platform. “JD provides the most trusted products and supreme delivery services,” he said. “Our company and  I always buy things on JD, especially expensive products.”

During the livestreaming event, Xu and Liang shared personal anecdotes about their own travels and shopping experiences on each other’s platforms over the years, lending a touch of intimacy to the festivities.

Spontaneous “red envelope” gifts were also announced, pocketed by a few lucky viewers.

Through the Singles Day promotion period, JD will continue to offer huge discounts with a one-stop preferential chain covering the front and back ends of airfare, hotel accommodations, tickets for parks and other entertainment events, and more.

Announced in August, the partnership between JD and Trip.com aims to help the two companies leverage each other’s resources in five areas, namely user flow, channel resources, cross-border marketing, business travel development and e-commerce cooperation.

More specifically, Trip.com has integrated its core product supply chain into JD.com, providing the company with real-time product inventory and highly competitive prices. In return, JD.com has opened its platform’s user traffic to Trip.com, providing all-around support in terms of daily operation and more precise-marketing based on user profiles.

For consumers, the benefits are obvious: a more fully integrated ecosystem of duty free, hotel and service industries and impressive deals. For example, when China relaxed travel restrictions to Macau earlier this autumn, JD and Trip.com launched a promotion that saw prices slashed at top hotels including the Marriott, MGM and more.

Consumers can expect the cooperation between JD and Trip.com to yield more deals in the coming months.

(kellydawson@jd.com, vivian.yang@jd.com)

by Martin Li

A recent report by Chinese publication Securities Daily (证券日报) has attributed the capital market’s increasing recognition of JD to the “unconventional perseverance” of the company’s founder and CEO Richard Liu.

The increasing market recognition is reflected by several achievements by JD this year, including the company’s successful secondary listing in Hong Kong with an aim to raise more than HK$30 billion, and the ongoing IPO application procedures of JD Digits in Shanghai and JD Health in Hong Kong as well

Liu’s consistent perseverance in integrity is one of the fundamental driving forces which brought JD where it is now – a company with market value of over US$ 100 billion.

Liu insisted on selling products at a fair and reasonable price seventeen years ago when JD was still a tiny company composed of several counters in an electronics market in Zhongguancun, Beijing.

Liu made prices transparent, sought to sell quantity rather than high prices, and stuck to providing good service. Plus, no tax evasion or counterfeits were found at his company. His method prevailed in a market where merchants would typically overcharge for products like computers by cheating customers.

Such perseverance in integrity gradually earned JD a good reputation and increasing patrons.

Some employees recalled that Liu’s commitment to integrity was unstoppable. He offered to provide invoices to customers even when they didn’t ask for them.

It is reported that someone persuaded Liu to reduce the company’s valuation between 2008 and 2009 in order to give himself more shares and kick out some investors. However, Liu refused to do that because investors used to help the company. On the contrary, Liu let investors earn more after the company was listed on the Nasdaq.

(bjlihao3@jd.com)

by Ella Kidron

In the span of just a few short months, JD has been quite active in the capital markets. On June 18^th, JD completed its secondary listing on the main board of Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEx) raising more than HK$ 30 billion to invest in technology. On September 11^th, the Shanghai Star Market made JD Digits’ (JDD) prospectus public, revealing that over 72% of the capital raised in the IPO would be used to invest in technology. And on September 27^th, the HKEx published JD Health’s prospectus, in which JDH focused on the creation of an “Internet + Healthcare” ecosystem.

As Chinese publication Securities Daily (证券日报) writes, JD broke away from the bounds of retail early on, and has since expanded into digital technology, logistics, health and other areas. Taking all of these pieces one at a time, all of this activity may seem sudden. But as the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and the same is true of JD’s business. The driving force today, as it was in the early days of the company, has been JD Founder and CEO Richard Liu’s steadfast conviction to technology-driven value creation.

Back in 2004, less than a month after JD had moved online, its website was hacked. The hacker had written in big letters, “JD’s network manager is a big idiot.” Securities Daily writes that it is because of this joke by the hackers that technology became a major obsession for Liu. Shortly after that incident, JD quickly recruited its first programmer and started to write its own e-commerce program.

Four years later, JD’s daily average order volume had increased from over ten orders to over 5,000, and JD’s website underwent a large-scale transformation. In 2008, JD’s technology team rented a villa in the outskirts on Beijing, and did nothing but write code from morning into the wee hours of the night in order to design a backend system to support an order capacity of 100,000 orders. Yet, in November that year, as soon as JD’s new system went online, the system immediately exceeded 10,000 orders.

In 2013, having had several years of e-commerce experience well under its belt, the company name was simplified from JD Mall (京东商城) to just JD (京东). Its positioning was to rely on technology to provide supply chain service, e-commerce, finance and logistics platforms – all efforts were inseparable from technology.

Fast forward another four years to 2017, when Liu said that the company would focus on three things, “Technology! Technology! Technology!” He said, “From the beginning, JD has not only been an e-commerce enterprise. Within the last ten years, we have done industrial internet in the retail industry.” Jon Liao, chief strategy officer of JD.com, explained that the logic of JD is simple – to use its accumulated retail industry ability to reconstruct other industries’ value chains. Using Internet technology to reshape many industries can be seen as a common thread in JD’s business. All of which stems from Liu’s fundamental belief in and commitment to technology.

Lei Xu, CEO of JD Retail, has expressed that retail has always been an industry that interacts with the development of technology, especially online retail. Therefore, technology-driven retail innovation drives the business, and the whole shopping process, adding to the overall upgrading of the user experience.

At the same time, Shengqiang Chen, CEO of JD Digits, has said that that it is necessary to establish technology leadership at all costs. JDD’s R&D professionals currently account for 70% of its staff. According to the company’s prospectus, the vast majority of JD’s revenue comes from technical services.

JD Health has spoken extensively about the creation of an “Internet + Healthcare” ecosystem. At the same time, JD Logistics has developed 30 highly intelligent Asia No. 1 logistics parks, which rely heavily on advanced technology including AI, 5G, cloud, IoT and more.

In the first half of 2020, JD invested RMB 7.54 billion yuan in technology R&D, making it one of the largest investors in tech among Chinese enterprises for several consecutive quarters. The company currently has over 18,000 R&D employees. Patent applications for 2019 exceeded 3,651.

(ella@jd.com)