JD.com is the fourth largest company in China. The company was established in 2004 by Richard Liu as an e-commerce business, although it was previously dealing with physical stores sales. For the past 15 years, Liu has stayed focused on growing this company, and as a result, it has recorded significant achievements.
Currently, the company is worth over $60 billion and employs over 67,000 workers. It offers local and global delivery services to its customers. In China, the company has a fast delivery process since it only takes 6-20 hours. For their global services, the process is not yet streamlined since it takes about 10-15 days to deliver to the United States.
Liu is now focused on making the company to the number one position as the largest company in China by market valuation, a dream he has harbored since starting this company.
Expansion plans
Richard Liu just like other business persons in China is looking for opportunities to expand to other parts of the world. He has created three plans that will be used in the global expansion of the company. First, they will start by bringing products from the rest of the world to the Chinese market. The second step will see the company move to southern Asia and the third will involve moving to Europe and America. According to Mr. Liu, this business will pursue growth in the fields of e-commerce, logistics, and technology. When the company ventures out to the world, it will carry along all its activities in these fields.
A day in Liu’s life
- Liu is a busy man. His daily schedule is full of meeting and activities that he is supposed to meet. Every day, he engages the executives of the company in internal meetings before embarking in other internal and external meeting via email and We Chat.
Will JD.com embrace acquisition?
In terms of growth in the global market, Liu believes that the company will apply different approaches based on the needs of the market. In southern Asia, the company has already decided to work with established partners instead of working from scratch. The company will apply among other methods acquisition to realize their goals quickly.
What about China’s economy?
In an interview at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Richard Liu expressed that positivity about the economic status of China. Although he believes the rate of growth will drop going forward, he reckons that there have been impressive achievements in the past few years. Equality in the financial sector has been obtained, and now the country is likely to grow as a single unit. He also pointed out that he expects the quality of products coming from the Chinese market to improve as the economic development stabilizes. Plans will now be more focused on bringing value and profits to the shareholders.
The future
When Richard Liu created JD.com as an internet business, he set out to bring a new narrative in the industry. The poor reputation that had been built by rogue businesses that delivered counterfeit products had to be eliminated. He put measures in place to facilitate sales of legit products and at the right price. JD.com started by selling IT and digital products in 2004 and by the end of 2010, they had literally everything under their stock. Today, they have a portfolio of over one billion products, which is a better performance than Walmart that has several million.
- JD.com has in the past decade invested in streamlining the costs and efficiency of doing their business. They want their products to compare with the rest of the world. At any given time, the company has over five million products in their stores and has a turnover of 34 days to clear the products. In the future, they want to do 10 million products with a turnover of 20 days.
