Abstract

JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce giant, announced its full year results for 2015. For the year ending December 2015, the company’s net revenue stood at US$28.0 billion (RMB 181.3 billion), an increase of 58% from the previous year. JD.com had witnessed a surge in its online retail market share in China, going up from 18.6% in 2014 to 23.2% in the third quarter of 2015. JD.com’s staff had outnumbered its archrival Alibaba's 22,000 employees, and had been giving a tough fight on delivery quality and standards. The man behind this resounding success, Liu Qiangdong (Liu), Chairman and CEO of JD.com, had transformed the humble brick and mortar electronics store into an online retail behemoth after he founded JD.com in 2004. Strong customer focus, continuous improvement, cutting-edge systems, and environmentally responsible business practices described Liu’s functioning. With his uncanny ability to learn lessons from failures, convert failures to success, utilize threats as opportunities, and churn strengths out of weaknesses, he built JD.com, China’s second largest online retailer. However, the future did not look easy. With Alibaba and Amazon-China catching up ,JD.com faced a stiff fight from fellow retailers. With e-commerce in China accounting for about 12.1% of total retail sales and promising to grow three-fold every year, the online retail space seemed set to witness a fierce fight among the players for market share.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Is designed to capture the various stages of entrepreneurship.
• Captures several unique traits of a successful entrepreneur like picking lessons from failures, converting the failures to success, utilizing threats as opportunities and churning strengths out of weaknesses.
• Captures the various unique strengths that Liu had instilled in place to fight the competition from the retail bigwigs.
• Offers several strategic and value-based insights for the aspiring entrepreneurs.

Keywords

E-commerce, JD.com, Liu Qiangdong, Alibaba, Entrepreneurship, China, Amazon, Walmart