JD.com’s Jingxi Pinpin Reportedly Cuts Back Business Operations

According to domestic media reports on Thursday, JD.com’s community group purchasing platform, Jingxi Pinpin, is further shrinking its business lines and may only retain operations in the cities of Beijing and Zhengzhou.

In 2019, JD.com launched Jingxi, a social e-commerce platform primarily targeted at small-town and rural markets, as a countermeasure to the rise of Pinduoduo. Jingxi Pinpin is a community group buying platform under Jingxi, and was officially launched on New Year’s Day in 2021. Jingxi Pinpin relies on JD.com‘s supply chain system to provide community users with services such as next-day arrival. It only operated in eight cities upon establishment, and once expanded into more than 20 Chinese provinces as its business scaled up.

In March 2022, Jingxi Pinpin was reported to reduce staff and stop operating in some cities. LastPost reported that on the afternoon of March 21, 400 employees of Jingxi Pinpin in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces were asked to leave. Jingxi Pinpin, which once operated business in more than 20 provinces, only had business in Beijing, Shandong, Henan and Hubei provinces.

An insider close to Jingxi said “the adjustment was for strategic focus and regional focus. Jingxi will take supply chain construction as the core in small-town and rural markets.”

SEE ALSO: JD.com Group-Buying Arm Reportedly Plans to Lay Off 10-15% of Staff

At the time of its establishment, Jingxi was aimed at China’s small-town and rural markets, and strived to attract traffic for JD.com at low cost. It has differentiation and complementarity with JD.com. However, JD.com users are mostly not in small-town and rural markets, so it has been difficult for Jingxi to gain an advantage in market competition, and it is also difficult to have the advantage in fresh produce sourcing.

In the first quarter of 2021, JD.com merged Jingxi and JD Production and Development into new businesses. These two were displayed alongside JD Retail and JD Logistics in financial information releases. According to the financial report, in Q1 to Q4, 2021, the new business segment including Jingxi recorded revenues of 5.15 billion yuan, 6.96 billion yuan, 5.732 billion yuan and 8.21 billion yuan respectively. However, the loss increased year-on-year, registering 2.2 billion yuan, 3.02 billion yuan, 2.073 billion yuan and 3.22 billion yuan respectively.