Topic

JD.com Saw China’s Online Market of Collectible Toys Soar in 2022

by Vivian Yang

With the phenomenal success of POP MART and similar brands in China’s art toy or “chao wan” market, JD Super, the FMCG department under JD.com, reported 82 percent YoY sales growth in the collectible toy category in 2022.

Collectible toys by POP MART

China’s increasing customer base of so-called ‘kidults’ has driven the industry boom, with data by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences showing that the market grew at a compound annual growth rate of more than 34 percent in the past seven years from 2015 to 2021. JD Super worked closely with leading players such as POP MART, Rolife, 52TOYS, BANDAI, and more, to bring the craze online with rich merchandise diversity and novel shopping experiences.

For example, to create an immersive experience for fans of Tencent’s Honor of Kings (HoK), the world’s largest mobile game, JD Super and HoK jointly launched a Super IP Day in 2022. During the promotional day on HoK’s JD flagship store, all of the IP’s collectible toys were made available in this single launch; 1,000 limited characters’ skin cards that bridge the physical and virtual worlds were sold in a blink of an eye. The campaign aroused wide attention beyond HoK fans, drawing 260 million clicks and 850 million viewership across the internet.

JD Super also took decisive actions to set up dedicated staff to identify emerging IP brands, recruit new sellers, and provide store assessment and training programs to help merchants effectively operate their online stores.

For 2023, JD Super will continue to enhance the variety of merchandise, expand the categories of art toys, and support brand partners to strengthen their market competitiveness, said Juan Ding, the general manager overseeing the toy category at JD.com.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD.com’s Valentine’s Day Report: See Those Prevailed

by Tong Shen

Luxury products, watches, beauty products, and gold and pearl jewelry remain popular Valentine’s Day gift choices among JD.com’s customers, demonstrating remarkable sales growth during the promotion period, according to a report released on February 14 by the J Shop, JD’s upgraded fashion and lifestyle omni-channel business.

LV, Tiffany and Bulgari became the most popular luxury brands among consumers, as shown by J Shop’s sales data. From Feb 8 to 13, the transaction volume of nearly 200 luxury and watch brands increased by more than 100 percent year-on-year on JD Luxury, and that of top luxury brands increased by more than 5 times year-on-year. Sales of Roger Viver and CELINE increased by more than 10 times year-on-year, and became the top luxury brands with the fastest growth rate during Valentine’s Day.

Moreover, Tiffany & Co. officially joined JD.com, which marked the brand’s first official third-party online flagship store in China, adding a new channel for Chinese consumers to access more choices and experiences for luxury shopping.

Meanwhile, beauty and skincare gift boxes saw a strong increase in sales. Lipsticks, facial essence, gift sets, perfumes and lotions ranked as the top 5 in the beauty and skincare category of J Shop.

Sales of gold jewelry, value-for-money pearl jewelry, as well as more personalized jewelry surged as well. Gold items such as gold necklaces, bracelets and more grew by more than 100 percent from Feb 8 to 14. Pearl brands overall increased by 213 percent in sales year-on-year, among which minimalist models were most preferred.

 

(press@jd.com)

Australian M3 Beef Tendons Top JD’s Yihaodian’s 2022 Best-Selling List

by Vivian Yang

Yihaodian Membership Store, China’s first B2C membership-only e-commerce platform under JD.com, released its annual most popular items ranking on February 15, based on the site’s 2022 sales and members’ ratings. The Australian M3 beef tendon of Yihaodian’s private label “One ‘s Member” topped the list of the most repurchased products, with more than 40 percent of members’ repeat repurchases. The item has made over 410 percent year-on-year sales growth.

In order to bring One’s Member customers a higher quality and value-for-money beef product, professional buyers conducted worldwide sourcing to finally pick a two-century-old Australian ranch to develop the 270-day, grain-fed, M3 level Angus beef tendon, according to Wang Pengfeng, head of the beef products for One’s Member.

During market research, the team found that Chinese consumers have rising demand for high-quality beef products such as M3, M5, M9, and other high-grade beef, with their preference turning from seasoned to raw cut, and grass-fed to grain-fed meat. Considering that the Chinese cooking style involves a lot of stewing, shabu-shabu, and marinating, Yihaodain developed moderately soft beef tendons that cater to Chinese people’s tastes.

Besides the quality control from the origin, Yihaodian leverages JD’s logistics network to stock fresh products in 16 warehouses across the country. These warehouses are equipped with cold-chain delivery capacity, ensuring the beef products can be freshly delivered to consumers’ doorsteps.

Meanwhile, Yihaodian always pays close attention to its members’ feedback. If a product’s satisfaction rate drops below 98 percent, the product manager will take immediate action for improvement or even de-list the item.

The model of the popular Australian beef tendon has been replicated in many other One’s Member products by Yihaodian these days, to incubate more hit products for its members. To date, Yihaodian has more than 400 kinds of One’s Member products. These products are sourced with its target customers in mind – mainly China’s middle-class shoppers – for a healthy and quality life. Additionally, the brand’s competitive prices are compared across main retailers on the market, in an effort to present prime product selections and make shopping easy and affordable.

Data shows that from 2016 to 2021, China’s beef consumption reached an average annual compound growth rate of 7.5 percent, and by 2022 the consumption volume totaled 10.245 million tons, making it the world’s second-largest country in beef consumption.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD Health: CEO Shows Remarkable Reporting Card

by Vivian Yang

JD Health has become the “first entry point for online health consumption” in China, said Enlin Jin, CEO of JD Health during the company’s 3rd partners’ meeting on Feb 10 in Beijing. The company is dedicated to providing access to all types of health consumption services in close collaboration with its partners, he added.

Data reveals that over the last three years, JD Health’s revenue has maintained a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 68 percent, while the average daily volume of online medical consultations and the annual number of active users both experienced CAGR growth of 48 and 213 percent, respectively.

As more users turn to JD Health Internet Hospital for dependable online medical care, it is expanding quickly. In the first half of 2022, the average daily consultation volume reached 250,000. Currently, the hospital has more than 45,000 doctors at the level of deputy chief physician and above, and has established 27 primary clinical departments and 151 secondary clinical departments.

On the aspect of pharmaceutical retailing, JD Pharmacy has grown by more than four times the industry average for the seventh consecutive year as of 2022. JD Pharmacy has accumulatively served over 100 million patients, and the DOT (i.e., duration of drug treatment) of patients with chronic diseases has been extended, which effectively improves the treatment impact on patients.

It is worth noting that in 2022, JD Health’s medical device user base surpassed 100 million, making it a stellar growth platform for many medical device brands. Among nearly 30,000 medical device brands from home and abroad that partnered with JD Health last year, over 40 brands had annual sales of over RBM 100 million yuan, and some top brands achieved annual sales of nearly RMB 2 billion yuan.

For nutrition and health care products, JD Health worked closely with brand partners to study user needs and propelled a 92 percent YoY sales increase among brand members. Meanwhile, JD Health offers the most comprehensive foods for special medical purposes (FSMP) online in the Chinese market.

On supply chain infrastructure, JD Health’s nationwide medicine warehouse network provides medicine storage service under all sorts of conditions in terms of different temperatures and dosage forms. It has achieved same-day delivery of products that are self-operated by JD Health teams in 146 cities and next-day delivery in 337 cities across China.

Highlighted during the partners’ meeting were four dimensions that will guide JD Health for the next development step to create fuller health service offerings to all people, including an open ecosystem, model expansion, service integration, and universal accessibility.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD Cloud Launches ChatJD to Integrate ChatGPT into Technology Products and Services

by Tong Shen

JD Cloud announced this week that it had launched “ChatJD,” an industrial version of ChatGPT focused on the vertical industrial fields of retail and finance.

“JD.com offers the best scenarios to accelerate the scale implementation of AIGC & ChatGPT,” said Dr. Xiaodong He, vice president of JD.com, an IEEE Fellow, and a specialist in conversational AI technology.

The industrial ChatJD will roll out through one platform, two fields and five applications. It will build a human-computer dialogue platform that understands and generates tasks in natural language processing, with parameters estimated to total hundreds of billions.

Built upon the company’s experience in intelligent dialogue accumulated over the past 10 years, coupled with years of practice in various businesses across retail, logistics, finance, health, and more, ChatJD is more focused on retail and finance. It has constructed a knowledge graph that is made of a four-layer knowledge system, 40+ independent systems, 3,000+ intentions and 30 million high-quality QAs that cover over 10 million retail commodities on JD.com.

Additionally, ChatJD will develop five application scenarios, ranging from content generation and human-computer dialogue to user intent understanding, information extraction, and sentiment classification, which will play an important role in areas such as automated customer consultation and service, smart marketing content generation, financial research report and more.

Since 2019, JD.com has begun to explore NLG (natural language generation) to research in AI-generated marketing content in house, such as generating product titles, selling points, and scripts for livestreaming and more. The service has covered more than 2,000 product categories and has been applied across multiple marketing channels on JD’s app, generating a total of more than 3 billion words of text. In addition, developed from JD’s early smart customer service chatbot, Yanxi AI platform provides consumers and merchants 24/7 services in shopping guidance and many others, covering end-to-end shopping nodes including pre-sale, sale, and after-sales. Yanxi is currently used by 588 million consumers and 178,000 merchants on JD.

Dr. He believes the impact of ChatGPT to the industry may rival what iPhone has produced. ChatGPT’s biggest innovation lies in the generation of natural language, which gradually sorts out the user’s intention through interactive dialogue and generates intact texts. From the technical point of view, ChatGPT innovatively uses semi-supervised learning algorithms compared to the previous unsupervised deep learning algorithms, and makes the model for content generation more organized. To some extent, it is actually a course correction to the past obsessive pursuit of mass (parameters) and unsupervised learning.

 

(press@jd.com)

Romance-related Spending Surges on JD Shop Now for Valentine’s Day

by Mary Ma

During this year’s Valentine’s Day, which came shortly after Chinese New Year, sales of traditional romantic gifts like flowers, chocolates and cakes spiked on JD.com’s on-demand retail business JD Shop Now, which delivers to consumers’ doorsteps within one hour.

As an essential part of JD’s eco-system, JD Shop Now closely links various physical retail stores, playing an important role in the product transaction network to improve the overall efficiency of goods picking and delivery.

From February 11 to 12, sales of flowers increased more than 3 times compared with that from February 4 to 5, with sales on February 14 accounting for about 60 percent of the whole festival period from Feb 11 to 14, according to JD Shop Now.

The number of searches for gifts to wives/girlfriends and husbands/boyfriends was both around sevenfold higher than on normal days. Data from JD Shop Now shows that beauty sets, perfume, and jewelry are listed as the top 3 gifts for women, and sales of makeup sets, perfume and silver ornaments were up by 10, 2 and 7 times respectively. Game machines, electric razors and skin-care sets are the most popular gifts for men.

Spending for pets was a clear growth trend, according to data. JD Shop Now saw sales surge in outdoor potable pet kits, pet medical products and beauty supplies.

Consumers’ shopping preferences vary in different cities. Consumers living in Shanghai shopped for a lot of chocolate products from JD Shop Now, followed by Dalian, Shijiazhuang, Shenzhen and Wuhan. Meanwhile, those in Beijing took the lead in the consumption of flowers, Guangzhou is top in beauty consumption, and consumers in Qingdao purchased mainly in outdoor sports equipment.

 

(mayiqian3@jd.com)

JD.com Welcomes Top Pump Brand Grundfos on its Site

by Vivian Yang

JD Industrial Supply launched the flagship store of the world-leading water pump Grundfos, a popular Danish brand, on January 30.

The first-party JD store offers 23 Grundfos products that can be applied to eight scenarios ranging from commercial building construction, industrial processes, urban water supply, industrial water treatment and more.

Wei Wang, general manager of the procurement department of JD Industrial Supply, said that the cooperation with Grundfos is an important step for the platform to provide more comprehensive industrial products and professional services for enterprise clients of all industries.

JD and Grundfos will work closely throughout the procurement process to provide efficient services from pre-sales technical consultations and after-sales installation to intelligent product type matching and other value-added services.

According to a spokesperson of Grundfos, it is critical to provide customized services in the pump purchase process, given the various operating circumstances in which the pump systems would be installed, especially under high or low temperatures, air pressure, and other extreme conditions. Grundfos will have its technical engineers collaborate directly with experts from JD Industrial Supplies to ensure smooth procurement and fulfillment, such as conducting on-site inspections, and providing design solutions, installation guidance, and other support.

Meanwhile, Grundfos’ product information will be connected with JD’s product standardization database. Known as “Mercator”, the database aims to create a set of unified parameter definitions for highly complex industrial supplies and a digitally intelligent solution, so that enterprise procurers only need to key in certain factors. For example, in Grundfos’ case, those factors might include liquid temperature, flow speed, delivery head, interface forms, etc. The database can quickly respond with precise product recommendations, greatly saving procurers’ time and energy in product selection.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD Property and Harvest’s REIT lists on the Shanghai Stock Exchange

Harvest & JD Storage Logistics REIT (Fund Code: 508098), a real estate investment trust (REIT) operated and managed by JD Property, a subsidiary under JD.com, officially listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Feb. 8. The REIT raised RMB 1.757 billion yuan with off-line allotment reaching 126.04 in over-subscription multiples. It is China’s first public warehousing and logistics REIT issued by a private company.

The assets of the REIT include three logistics parks located in Langfang, Wuhan, and Chongqing, covering a total floor area of 350,995 square meters. All three are scarce high-standard warehouses that represent the highest level of warehouses in China in terms of scale and automation, offering reliable profitability and a strong capability to fend off risks. The occupancy rates of these three parks are all 100 percent, with average leasing terms reaching five years, higher than the industry average of three years.

JD Property provides integrated services for industrial infrastructure development and asset management, and owns all of JD.com’s self-built logistics facilities. As of now, JD Property’s modern warehousing network has been deployed in 29 provincial-level administrative regions across China, with a total area of over 20 million square meters under management. The company also runs 24 projects in Southeast Asia and other regions overseas.

Wei Hu, Senior Vice President of JD.com and CEO of JD Property; Zhonglei Wang, a JD Property employee of the Langfang logistics park project; Chun Yang, a JD Property employee of the Chongqing logistics park project; Xuejun Zhao, Chairman of Harvest Fund; Lingfei Lu, CMO of Harvest Fund, and Yijun Wang, Head of Infrastructure Investment Management Department of Harvest Fund, rang the listing gong together at the ceremony.

Sandy Xu, CFO of JD.com said: “JD.com’s development is rooted in the real economy, as it grows in and serves the real economy. The value of the company’s supply chain infrastructure is recognized by various sectors of society including investors.” She added, “As the first private warehousing and logistics REIT, Harvest JD Warehousing Infrastructure REIT will greatly stimulate and enhance the vitality and confidence of the private sector to invest in supply chain infrastructure, and help to promote the digitalization, networking and intelligentization of the warehousing and logistics industry. JD.com will also unswervingly promote the construction of supply chain infrastructure.”

 

(press@jd.com)