JD.com Initiates Global Expansion, Launches “Global Sales” in Four Countries

According to a report from China’s Caijing magazine, JD.com‘s global sales business has newly launched in the United States, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, with the performance requirement being to break even. JD.com is hoping for an increase in orders from “Black Friday”. The business plans to continue expanding into markets such as Europe, North America, and Oceania.

In August 2024, JD.com established a new “Global Sales Business Department” under its “Overseas Business Department”, responsible for this business. The Overseas Business Department BU (Business Unit) is directly under JD.com Group and is parallel to JD Retail, JD Logistics, JD Technology, and other BGs (Business Groups), and currently has no head.

The head of the Global Sales Business Department is Li Yayun. Li Yayun joined JD.com in 2007 and has served as the head of JD.com‘s legal team and the group’s Chief Compliance Officer.

JD.com‘s internationalization has been underway for ten years. It has tried multiple times to test e-commerce platforms, initially focusing on Russia and then shifting to Southeast Asia, but progress was not smooth, and it ultimately shut down. In recent years, JD.com‘s internationalization efforts have continued, mainly setting up warehousing and logistics in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America, and then opening e-commerce and new retail sites based on fulfillment capabilities.

In addition, in February this year, JD.com Global Sales announced an expansion to 24 European countries, but it is still unclear whether this business now falls under the aforementioned two or three management blocks. JD.com also invested in Vietnam’s B2C e-commerce platform Tiki in 2017 and Southeast Asian online travel unicorn Traveloka in 2020.

At the end of 2022, Liu Qiangdong returned to JD.com and proposed a low-price strategy. Taobao and Douyin also began to emphasize low prices, trying to seize a share of Pinduoduo. In the first half of this year, Taobao and Douyin have shifted their focus and no longer emphasize “price power”. So far, JD.com has not made similar changes.

For JD.com now, domestic e-commerce business growth is nearing its ceiling, and the low-price strategy is limited in effect. According to its financial report, the year-on-year growth rate of revenue for the whole year of 2023 and the first half of 2024 has dropped to 4%. JD.com needs to find new growth points. International business may be a solution, but the era of not counting input has passed. How to achieve growth in unfamiliar overseas markets that are already full of competitors is JD.com‘s new challenge.

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