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JD.com Utilizes Robots in Shanghai for Contactless Delivery

by Yuchuan Wang

As the current COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai grows, JD Logistics has launched its autonomous delivery robots in the city’s Pudong New Area to provide contactless last mile delivery for certain locked down neighborhoods.

The robot applied in Shanghai can load up to 100 kilograms of goods and drive 80 kilograms per charge. With AI technology and multiple sensors, the robot can recognize, avoid obstacles, and plan its route to the destination.

Since 2020, JD has deployed its autonomous delivery vehicles for COVID-19 relief in Wuhan, Shijiazhuang, Guangzhou, Beijing, Tianjin, Shenzhen and now Shanghai. In Wuhan, the robots traveled over 6,800 kilometers and delivered more than 13,000 packages during the peak of the pandemic in early 2020. “Big White”, one of the robots used in Wuhan, is now a permanent collection of the National Museum of China in Beijing.

JD.com debuted its first autonomous delivery vehicle in 2016 and revealed the Level-4 autonomous driving robot in 2019, becoming the world’s first company to apply Level-4 autonomous driving technology on public roads without any human interaction.

So far, the company has applied nearly 400 autonomous delivery vehicles in more than 25 cities in China, meeting the delivery needs in scenarios such as residential compounds, commercial centers, business parks, hotels, university campuses, supermarkets and more.

 

(yuchuan.wang@jd.com)

Six-Year Journey of JD.ID: Annual Compound Growth Rate Doubles the Industry Average

by Yuchuan Wang

March 28, 2022 marks the sixth anniversary of JD.ID, JD.com’s e-commerce business in Indonesia. In the past years, JD.ID’s annual compound growth rate has been twice the industry’s average and has become one of the major e-commerce companies locally, with a distribution network covering 90% of provinces in Indonesia.

Since its establishment, JD.ID has focused on building an integrated e-commerce infrastructure. With 18 warehouses nationwide, the company’s warehousing area has surpassed 100 thousand square meters. Thousands of couriers serve more than 500 cities, spanning across all the major islands of the country. As of now, over 85% of orders on JD.ID can be fulfilled within 24 hours. JD.ID also signed a partnership with Indonesia’s national post company PT Pos Indonesia in 2021 to cooperate in express delivery, logistics, payment and more. The partnership is expected to provider better logistics service to customers nationwide.

While e-commerce is growing, the offline market remains the current major shopping choice of Indonesia consumers. In this context, JD.ID introduced an omni-channel shopping model by launching seven self-owned offline stores in greater Jakarta area, offering a variety of products including electronics, appliances, home products and more. Consumers can choose to purchase in the store or have their products delivered to their doorstep.

JD.ID has also opened up its omni-channel technology and abilities to third party businesses. Trikomsel, one of the largest mobile phone retailers in Indonesia, has brought over 100 stores online on JD.ID’s Nearby Channel, connecting to the fast growing online traffic. So far, revenues generated from JD Nearby has accounted for over 60% of Trikomsel’s total revenue.

Stepping into the seventh year, JD.ID will continue to provide authentic products and premium services to Indonesian customers and keep contributing to the local economy by helping SMEs and local people.

 

(yuchuan.wang@jd.com)

JD Sales Data Show Stronger Consumer Demand for Wearable Devices

by Doris Liu

The turnover of smart wristbands increased five times year-on-year (YOY) during the JD Computer and Digital Super Category Day in February. Also, Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro ECG saw sales increase by five times month-on-month four hours after the start of a promotional event in March on JD.com, indicating strong consumer demand for wearable devices in China.

A recent report from International Data Corporation (IDC), a leading consulting firm, showed that China’s wearable devices market reached 37.53 million units in Q4 2021 and nearly 140 million units in the whole year of 2021, up 23.9 and 25.4 percent YOY respectively.

In 2021, hearables sustained consistent growth with sales of 78.98 million units, up 55.4 percent YOY. The shipments of watches were 39.56 million units, up 21.4 percent YOY, in which adult watches accounted for 20.13 million units with a 31-percent increase YOY. The category of children’s watches saw an increase of 12.8 percent YOY with shipment volume reaching 19.43 million units. Meanwhile, the wristbands declined by 26.3 percent YOY, influenced by weaker market demand and price increases.

According to IDC, wearable device shipments are expected to exceed 160 million units in 2022, with an annual growth rate of 18.5 percent in China.

The strengthening of public awareness in the health sector has stimulated the demand for wearable devices. In addition, through years of cooperation with Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and other brands, JD has enhanced the sales by multiple methods such as the C2M (Consumer-to-manufacturer) model, one-hour delivery service and omni-channel solutions that optimize both online and offline shopping experiences.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)

JD Health Releases 2021 Annual Results

by Vivian Yang

JD Health released its 2021 financial year annual results on March 28th, the company’s second full-year earnings release after its listing on Hong Kong Stock Exchange (6618.HK) on Dec. 8, 2020. The company announced net revenue of RMB 30.68 billion yuan, an increase of 58.3% year on year. Profit (on a non-IFRS basis) was RMB 1.4 billion yuan, up by 91.5% YoY.

JD Health’s business maintained strong growth momentum in 2021, driven by a growing user base and improvements to the user experience.  On Dec. 21, 2021, annual active user accounts reached 123 million, representing a net addition of over 33.56 million from the 12-month period ended December 31, 2020. Additionally, its online medical consultation service grew rapidly, with its daily average consultations exceeding 190,000.

In his letter to shareholders, JD Health CEO Enlin Jin wrote that “over the past year, under the guidance of the relevant policies and regulations, and adhering to long-term value, JD Health consistently enhanced its capabilities by opening its ‘retail pharmacy + healthcare service’ ecosystem, helping the upstream, midstream and downstream entities in the industry in their digital transformation, and thus providing quality healthcare services to a wider group of people.”

In addition, “by offering professional supply chain and technology solutions, we served a growing number of local government departments and medical institutions, which accelerated the digital transformation of the healthcare industry and promoted the deeper integration and development of China’s digital and real economy,” Jin noted.

With the business philosophy of “based on trust and focusing on customer’s health”, JD Health is committed to improving inclusive healthcare for Chinese people at large while creating long-term and sustainable value for shareholders and the society.

According to the release, as of the end of 2021 JD Health has been leveraging 19 medicine warehouses and over 400 non-medicine warehouses across the country to realize next-day delivery of more than 80% of its self-operated medicines, and JD Pharmacy is able to deliver cold-chain pharmaceutical products in over 200 cities in China through its proprietary cold-chain logistics network.

JD Health continued to deepen collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies such as Sanofi China, UCB China, Novartis and more, and became their first choice to release new medicines for online sales as well as a preferred partner to explore digital marketing innovations.

On the development of JD Health’s internet hospital, more than 45,000 doctors with the level of deputy chief physicians (second highest of medical professional title in China) and above have joined JD Health, and together collectively handled a daily average of more than 190,000 online consultations last year. Meanwhile, nine specialized medical centers for infection and liver diseases, brain nutrition, skin repair and more were established, bringing the overall number of specialized medical centers to 27 under JD Health’s internet hospital.

The “Family Doctor” telemedicine program continues to consolidate medical services and products’ resources and provide more diversified service scenarios to users, such as online video or audio consultations that support multiple users’ same time chat, service provision to grassroots communities and more.

In the past year, JD Health’s Rare Diseases Care Project and Fund have helped more than 24,000 patients acquire medications and healthcare services. And the company went full-force for the anti-COVID fight in different regions in China and natural disaster relief such as the flood in Henan province by donating medical supplies and offering voluntary health consultation services both online and offline.

Read the full report of JD Health’s annual results 2021 here.

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD Health to Promote Chinese Consumers’ Access to FSMP

by Vivian Yang

JD Health has been expanding supplies and services on foods for special medical purposes (FSMP) to make them more accessible and affordable for Chinese consumers via the internet, said Ye Yang, general manager of the nutrition and healthcare department of JD Health during a webcast discussion on the topic of FSMP’s innovations and role in promoting health in China held by People’s Daily in Beijing on March 13th.

FSMP are intended to provide nutritional support to people who suffer from a specific disease, disorder or a medical condition, as a part of their dietary management. In recent years, Chinese policies such as the National Nutrition Plan (2017-2030) have put forward clear requirements for promoting FSMP and its application standards. It has also drawn increasing attention among the larger public, especially because of its value for the elderly, infants, pregnant women and patients who have special nutrition needs.

JD Health is China’s online channel that offers the most comprehensive FSMP categories, with 41 products available for online sales so far that have been approved on the Chinese market and are suitable for home use.

Nutrition-related content on JD Health’s online hospital

JD Health’s data shows that 92 percent of users wished to receive professional guidance on healthcare advice and product usage when they look for FSMP products online. Thus an “Ask a Doctor” tab is embedded in JD’s products’ pages where users can directly interact with doctors or nutritionists to get real-time support. Users can also go to the dedicated portal of the nutrition department under JD Health’s online hospital for more comprehensive knowledge and consultations.

JD Health launched customized Family Doctor telemedicine service for FSMP users

Last October, JD Health introduced seven customized Family Doctor services for FSMP users, focusing on providing personalized telemedicine services for allergy-prone infants, malnourished infants, patients after tumor surgeries, and more special groups of users.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

JD.com Launches Cargo Flights from China to Brazil and Germany

by Yuchuan Wang

JD.com has launched two charter cargo flights from China to Brazil and Germany on March 17 and 19 respectively. Since 2021, the company has consecutively launched cargo flights from China to Thailand, the US, the UK, Brazil and Germany, connecting sellers and buyers from the continents of Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America.

Serving as the first cargo flight of JD.com from China to Latin America, the route between Hong Kong International Airport and Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil will be operated twice a week by Angola Airlines. The inaugural flight carried a variety of e-commerce goods from China such as FMCG products, sports equipment, digital accessories and more. Local goods were shipped to China on the return trip, facilitating the fast-growing cross-border trade in the two regions.

The route between Xinzheng International Airport in Zhengzhou, Henan province and Cologne Bonn Airport, the second largest airport in Germany, is scheduled three times a week by Capital Airlines of China, and will be transporting mainly e-commerce goods including apparel, cosmetics, digital accessories, furniture and more for export and milk powder, food and auto parts for import. The inaugural flight also transported COVID-19 rapid test kits manufactured in China.

Except for supporting the cross-border transportation between China and Germany, the Zhengzhou – Cologne route will set Cologne as a hub and cover major European cities including Frankfurt, Brussels, Liege, Amsterdam, London and Paris. The company’s self-owned overseas warehouses in Germany, Poland, the UK, the Netherlands and France will be connected to provide integrated supply chain solutions.

According to JD Logistics’ first annual financial report, the company had nearly 80 bonded and overseas warehouses by the end of 2021. Its global supply chain network reaches over 220 countries and regions.

 

(yuchuan.wang@jd.com)

TORY BURCH Opens Flagship Store on JD.com

by Xiaoqian Han

The Tory Burch flagship store opened on JD.com on March 22, offering consumers a wide assortment of collections, including ready-to-wear, handbags, shoes, and accessories.

Three styles of the brand’s iconic Kira bag in denim were first released on this store, and the new spring/ summer collections of Tory Burch featured by supermodel Liu Wen also became available at the same time.

New spring/ summer collections featured by  Liu Wen
Tory Burch iconic Kira bag

Founded in 2004 in New York City, Tory Burch is an American luxury brand known for beautiful, timeless pieces and rich storytelling that evokes optimism and joy.

“We are thrilled for the launch of our official flagship store on JD.com. It created a unique opportunity for us to expand our reach to our fans and new customers on JD.com. We look forward to offering the bespoke shopping experience and introducing Tory Burch’s colorful world to everyone,” said Paolo Zullo, SVP, General Manager, Tory Burch China.

To date, JD has gathered more than 300 flagship stores of major fashion and lifestyle brands, covering jewelry, clothing, luggage, shoes, and home furnishing. Tory Burch’s flagship store on JD.com will enable consumers with more options to shop for fashion items online.

 

(hanxiaoqian3@jd.com)

A Major Achievement: Super Deep Learning Model by JD Explore Academy

by Doris Liu

A super deep learning model, ViTAEv2, which was jointly proposed by JD Explore Academy and the University of Sydney, Australia, was recently ranked top in accuracy of image classification on ImageNet ReaL without using extra training data.

With larger scale, better results and better adaptability to various vision tasks, the model with 600 million parameters set a world record of 91.2 percent accuracy in February in the field of image classification technology by not using extra training data.

The ViTAEv2 model adopts a “pre-training and fine-tuning” paradigm to make a breakthrough in model architecture and training paradigm, which fully uses the effectiveness of inductive bias in large-scale models, as well as pre-training and migration learning algorithms that fit the structure of the model to achieve the target results.

JD Explore Academy also developed the few-shot learning capability of the large-scale ViTAEv2 model by fine-tuning the large-scale ViTAEv2 model with 1, 10 and 100 percent of the data respectively, and the result showed that when fine-tuned with only a small amount of data, namely 10 percent, the large-scale model significantly outperformed the smaller scale model which was using all the data. “It further confirmed that the large-scale model has a strong ability in few-shot learning, which indicates that the super deep model has strong representation ability, learning ability and sample efficiency,” said a deep learning scientist from JD Explore Academy.

The ViTAEv2 model’s ability to help solve challenging tasks with low or even zero resources was fully validated, as well as its ability to reduce data annotation costs, accelerate algorithm development cycles, simplify model deployment, empower and facilitate the R&D and implementation of next-generation automated learning technologies.

As the largest public dataset for image classification, the ImageNet dataset has attracted the attention and participation of top international technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, as well as leading research universities such as Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National University of Singapore especially in terms of the accuracy ranking list. Its data metrics are widely recognized as an important criterion to measure the level of computer vision technology.

The performance of the ViTAEv2 model helped JD Explore Academy take its computer vision models to a new level, and is expected to continue to push forward the development of a range of vision tasks, such as semantic segmentation, object detection, pose estimation, and video object segmentation.

 

(liujun215@jd.com)