Liu Qiangdong Chairs During the Best Quarter JD.com Has Ever Seen

As head of JD.com, China’s largest online retailer, Liu Qiangdong has seen his company soar to meteoric heights, with yearly revenues exceeding $80 billion dollars. Although there has been a tremendous amount of economic damage resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, JD.com’s 2020 second quarter has been absolutely stellar, with revenue rising as high as $28.5 billion. This surge in revenue represents a double-digit percentage increase in both online sales and the company’s customer base. 

JD.com has expanded its marketing strategy over recent years and the results are appearing to pay off through its many subsidiary departments, especially JD Health and JD Logistics. 

JD Health is the division responsible for the company’s pharmaceutical distribution and has been instrumental for many individuals and companies throughout the pandemic. Recently, JD Health partnered with Hillhouse Capital to expand its ability to meet the ever diversifying healthcare sector and to make its supply chain more flexible. With the addition of the company’s steps to curtail the impact of potential COVID-19 infections, such as regularly screening workers and offering contactless delivery, JD Health is looking more and more like a realistic option for healthcare organizations to maintain a business relationship with. 

Similarly, JD Logistics, recently renamed JDL, has been making significant developments of its own. Already a significant force in China’s distribution sector, JDL has just rolled out an automatic heavy item retrieval system that is saving people tons of time and energy. Made possible by a dramatic increase in the number of warehouses at its disposal, JDL has promised to dedicate much of its energy towards services that cater to underserved markets over the next decade. 

The ability for JD.com to see so much success in the face of adverse circumstances can largely be attributed to Liu Qiangdong’s leadership. 

Born in rural China to migrant worker parents who sought employment in the coal industry, Liu was primarily raised by his grandmother and endured an early life of poverty; living in a house with no electricity, no running water, and forced to eat the exact same food day after day. Although it was hard, Liu learned the true value of everyday items and never took anything for granted. 

Liu Qiangdong also became quite ambitious from an early age. Deciding to save up what little money he could muster, Liu traveled to his province’s capital city during his middle school years where he realized he wanted to change the world in a big way. 

Liu was eventually accepted to university, where he learned computer programming skills that would later become invaluable. He also briefly started his first business, which ultimately failed, but he learned a valuable lesson about always taking a hand-on approach.. 

After working a corporate position at a Japanese company for a couple years, Liu Qiangdong used the money he saved up to open his own technology kiosk in Beijing, which quickly became successful. Liu was able to open several retail stores and JD.com’s success became all but assured when online retailing began to boom in the early 2000s.