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JD Logistics Airlines Launches Shenzhen–Hangzhou Route

Posted on by Yuchuan Wang

by Yuchuan Wang

JD Logistics announced on Nov. 22 that the company’s airlines affiliate JD Logistics Airlines (formerly known as JD Airlines) has launched a self-owned all-cargo route between Shenzhen, Guangdong province and Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. The first flight took off from Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport to Hangzhou International Airport at 1:30 AM on Nov. 22, and then flew back to Shenzhen and landed at 7:50 AM.

JD Logistics Airlines will operate the route six times a week to mainly carry fresh produce, fashion and apparel products, medicine and medical products, and more categories which need timely delivery or are of high value.

The new route will further improve air logistics efficiency in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, and will strengthen next-day delivery capabilities. It will join JD Logistics Airlines’ previous launched all-cargo route between Nantong, Jiangsu province and Beijing to promote the highly efficient goods circulation among Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the two deltas.

On August 31, JD Logistics received the Operation Certification of Public Air Carriers of Large Aircraft from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), marking the official commencement of the operation of JD Logistics Airlines. According to the company’s plan, it will first develop domestic air cargo around China’s major hubs to cover major cities nationwide and gradually develop in the international market.

 

(yuchuan.wang@jd.com)

 

JD.com: Highlights of Q3 2022 Earnings Call

Posted on by Doris Liu

by Doris Liu

Facing complex dynamics, JD.com continued to maintain a steady and healthy business growth, helped build certainty for real economy in China and ensured best possible service to its customers, as demonstrated by the company’s earnings of the third quarter of 2022, released on November 18.

In the third quarter, JD.com saw net revenues increase by 11.4 percent from the third quarter of 2021, reaching RMB243.5 billion (US$34.2 billion) amid challenges brought by the macro economy, supply chain disruptions and more. Net service revenues were RMB46.5 billion (US$6.5 billion), an increase of 42.2 percent year-on-year. Net income attributable to ordinary shareholders for Q3 was RMB6.0 billion (US$0.8 billion), compared with a net loss of RMB2.8 billion YOY.

“We are delighted to see substantial improvement in our growth quality this year,” shared Lei Xu, CEO of JD.com, during a conference call to discuss Q3 2022 earnings. “Given the evolving economic and industry environment, JD made a pre-emptive decision to focus on our core businesses since the beginning of the year, while reinforcing quality operations and management, and attaching high importance to business health.”

Thanks to JD’s continuous emphasis on user experience with refined operation, the consumer mindshare, structure, as well as supply chain efficiency have dramatically improved. JD’s annual active user base in Q3 climbed 6.5 percent to 588.3 million, mainly driven by the net addition of over 10 million active users from the core retail business. In particular, the scale of JD Retail’s consumers who repurchase and Plus members were growing faster, accounting for a higher proportion in the total user base. The Plus members had kept a high degree of loyalty, engagement and purchasing power, with the average annual spending of each member eight times higher than a non-Plus consumer.

“JD.com’s relentless focus on user experience, cost and efficiency has allowed us to continuously expand our user base while delivering profitable growth,” said Sandy Xu, Chief Financial Officer of JD.com.

As a new type of real economy-based enterprise, JD.com continues to invest in the marketplace ecosystem construction, omni-channel business layout, and well-established supply chain infrastructure to invigorate and empower the real economy.

In Q3, the number of third-party merchants within JD Retail’s online marketplace ecosystem achieved an over 20 percent increase for the 7th consecutive quarter. In addition, with the launch of the FENDI flagship store, JD.com became the first company to partner with LVMH for nine top fashion brands. Besides the over 70 national pavilions, which bring consumers a variety of specialty products from around the world, JD.com newly opened pavilions from nearly 20 countries during the 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion.

JD’s intra-city business also indicated momentum of rapid development, benefiting both brands and offline merchants. As the only on-demand retail platform selected for Apple’s pre-sale, JD Daojia (JDDJ) joined hands with Shop Now, JD.com’s one-hour delivery service, as well as Apple authorized resellers, to secure inventory of iPhone14 models, promptly open and process pre-sale orders, and provide instant delivery services to customers, boosting sales to RMB200 million within the first six hours of the opening day of this year’s Singles’ Day Grand Promotion.

“JD’s involvement in intra-city business is based on user demand, not purely business growth opportunities,” said Lei Xu, expressing that the company is willing to open up its capabilities of supply chain and services to drive the digitally intelligent transformation of up- and down-stream partners.

“We know very well the difficulty of offline business of SMEs, that’s why we never tried to carve up their profits but work together in synergy to reduce costs and gain reasonable profits from cooperation.”

By exploring in-depth with key clients in the fields of FMCG, home appliance, clothing among others, JD Logistics’ (JDL) capabilities are gaining more recognition, with the revenue from external clients growing to nearly 70 percent of its total revenue in Q3. By the end of Q3, JDL (incl. Deppon) operated more than 1,500 warehouses and managed logistics infrastructure that had exceeded 30 million square meters.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

JD.com Announces Third Quarter 2022 Results

Posted on by Yuchuan Wang

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

Posted on by Doris Liu

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.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

 

 

Beer Products See Burgeoning Growth with JD Super

Posted on by Mengyang He

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.

Tsingtao beer

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.

 

(hemengyang5@jd.com)

JD Cloud Ranks No.1 in World’s Top Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling

Posted on by Doris Liu

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.

An example of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue generation

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.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

JD Health: Diversified Demands Drove Growth during 2022 Singles’ Day Grand Promotion

Posted on by Vivian Yang

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.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD Singles’ Day: Sales of Over 1,100 Brands Double on JD Worldwide

Posted on by Doris Liu

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).

 

(liujun215@jd.com)