On 17 June 2025, JD.com founder and chairman Richard Liu met a group of media at the company’s headquarters in the outskirts of Beijing. During the session, Liu offered a reflection about the company’s past five years, present strategy and future.
Here is a transcript of this interview, translated into English. All remarks are delivered in the first person from Richard Liu’s perspective and not that of Momentum Works
His reflections are candid, but met a lot of scepticisms since the publication. We will discuss those in a separate piece later. But here is Richard Liu:
1.On “Venturing into food delivery and hospitality”
At JD Group, every three years we launch a new business model—this rhythm is constant.
But the past five years have been regrettable; JD has declined with no innovation, growth, or progress. Crudely put, these have been the least distinctive, least valuable five years in my entrepreneurial journey.
Going forward, we will have one “super project” per year. Currently, six innovative initiatives including a stablecoin project are underway.
Back in 2007, we built our second company, JD Logistics. Every three years since then, another major company emerged: JD Finance, JD Industry, JD Health, JD Supply Chain Development—nearly one global-scale company each year.
But JD only ventures into businesses that revolve around the supply chain. If it isn’t related, I stay away.
Today, 100% of JD’s businesses are built around the supply chain. My entire life, and the entire JD Group, will continue to operate this way.
We’re not a diversified company in the usual sense. Although we may appear to have many businesses, they all serve the supply chain. This includes our new food delivery services, which are intended to support the fresh-produce supply chain.
In about a month, JD will launch a food delivery model completely different from Meituan’s. We’ve been preparing since day one. I believe this model will fundamentally solve food-safety issues and allow consumers to access safe, cost-effective meals.
People see the “food delivery battle” between us and Meituan founder Wang Xing as a competition for meal orders. But we’re actually targeting the fresh-produce supply chain. I don’t need to make a profit selling the meals at the front end—I only need to earn through the supply chain behind it.
Moreover, 40% of our delivery customers cross-shop on our ecommerce platform. Losing money on delivery is still cheaper than buying traffic from Douyin or Tencent.
In 2007, we signed up our first delivery courier. At that time, no other company except JD Logistics provided full social insurance for riders. From our first courier on day one, we’ve fully contributed social insurance. In Beijing, our full-time couriers earn over RMB 13,000 pre-tax monthly—and we pay contributions based on that amount.
Regarding the rumoured dinner between me, Wang Xing, and Yao Jinbo (founder of 58.com) —my purpose was to invite Wang Xing. I asked two trusted friends to be witnesses. I said straight: “Bro, I’m entering food delivery officially.”
As for the “on-demand to home” strategy, the hotel sector also relies on a massive, complex, costly supply chain. For example, our subsidiary JD Industrials helps industrial product costs—what we call non-manufacturing primary materials—drop from the industry’s typical 60% gross margin to just 20%, cutting costs by two-thirds.
If you don’t create value, and margins stay at 60%, you’ll eventually lose out in that sector. We suggested creating a new logistics channel for hotels and restaurants. First, we started with convenience stores—covering 1.5 million locations—solving the counterfeit issue and reducing input costs by 30–40%, leaving us a 10% margin.
After success in convenience stores, we moved into restaurants and delivery, and now hospitality. All of this lays groundwork for our supply chain.
Once we succeed in delivery, restaurants won’t have to choose sides; no platform can coerce them. Competition will centre on cost, price, service, and quality.
We define “experience” in three aspects: product, price, and service. All our models compete on offering better products, cheaper prices, and better service.
Over the past 21 years of JD’s ecommerce operations, the reason people choose to shop on JD boils down to just those three things. That’s why—when it comes to supply chains for food and beverage, for hospitality, and in the future, for beauty services, medical aesthetics, and even hospitals—we are confident. Our hospital supply chain has already been successfully built.
In the future, for every kind of business model, we will use our “new channel” (新通路) approach to provide them with supply chain services. This is fully aligned with JD Group’s philosophy of focusing solely on supply chain operations. That is our logic.
Secondly, on the consumer-facing side: if you have needs such as food delivery or business travel, and you’ve already used our platform for shopping services, then we can also offer you travel-related services.
2. On “International Business”
In the future, the most important segment for JD will be international.
First of all, we’ve been operating in Europe for three years. Now, the foundational logistics infrastructure for JD in Europe is basically in place. But it’s still not enough—we need to keep working for another half year. By the end of this year, it should be complete, and next year we can begin operations.
The downside of JD’s business model is that it’s slow, labor-intensive, and exhausting. It takes several years of hard work before people start to recognise what we’ve built, and only then can we start doing business—because our model is different from pure platform models.
Second, JD’s international strategy does not follow the cross-border ecommerce model. My international strategy is local ecommerce: building local teams, doing local procurement. Of course, our strategy is different from Amazon’s. If we followed their model exactly, JD would have no competitive advantage.
Our definition of success is helping 1,000 Chinese brands succeed—if we achieve that, JD will have succeeded too. These 1,000 brands are not available on Amazon, nor are they carried by local retailers. If the products we sell are the same as Amazon’s, all just Western brands, then JD really would have no advantage at all.
That’s why we might need another five years—because we need to talk to each of these 1,000 brands one by one. We need to help them become compliant, get certified locally, and do a huge amount of groundwork. It’ll take another five years before we can fully bring these 1,000 brands overseas.
At the same time, even though we are selling Chinese brands, they are brands like Midea and Haier—honestly, their product quality often already surpasses that of Western brands, and their innovation capabilities are even stronger.
So, our goal is to bring these brands abroad, over the course of 10 or 20 years. JD’s model has never been about moving fast. Everything we do takes 10 to 20 years to succeed. Only after that will Western consumers begin to accept Chinese brands and trust a retail platform from China.
We will also continue to innovate every year. For example, stablecoins are a key innovation project that we’re actively developing.
Our goal is to apply for stablecoin licenses in all major sovereign currency countries around the world, enabling cross-border settlements between global enterprises. We want to reduce the cost of international payments by 90% and raise transaction efficiency to under 10 seconds. Right now, using SWIFT between businesses takes an average of 2 to 4 days and costs are quite high. After we complete B2B payments, we will begin expanding into C2C payments.
Although not all of these innovation projects will succeed—and some will inevitably fail, costing us time and money—that’s just how business works. If you don’t take risks, you will never reach the top. That’s why we pursue new innovation projects every year.
We no longer plan to engage in any business models unrelated to the supply chain. We will instead go deeper and stronger into the seven or eight existing business models centered around the supply chain, and turn them into international businesses.
So to sum up our international strategy in one sentence: none of JD’s business models can succeed in just three or five years—they will all take ten or twenty years. But we firmly believe that only by doing what we believe is right can we go the distance.
- On “Entrepreneurial Aspiration”
In 2006, I went to the United States. Through an investor’s introduction, I had the opportunity to visit the global headquarters of UPS. The drive from the hotel to their headquarters took about an hour—the headquarters was located in a remote suburb, far from the city center.
During my conversation with their CEO, he personally took me on a tour. He proudly told me that the headquarters was built in the forest, and not a single tree was removed during the entire construction process.
I asked him a question: “As the headquarters of a major Fortune 500 company, why build it so far out in the suburbs, far from the city center?” He replied, “As a large corporation, we must take responsibility for the city. Big enterprises should not occupy the city center.”
That same year, JD Group’s headquarters was still located in Galaxy Tower in Beijing, and we had just 100 employees. At the time, I thought: as long as we keep doing the right thing—something valuable and long-term—if we serve consumers well and our business model is sound, I firmly believed we would eventually grow big. When I came back, I discussed with a few employees and wondered: how big could we become in the future? Could we grow to a size of 10,000 people?
Back then, we only had 100 people in the office—who could’ve imagined we’d one day have 10,000? We thought about what all those people would be doing. Of course, this only referred to the staff at headquarters. So in 2009, we decided: let’s build a headquarters big enough to house 10,000 people. To do that, we had to move away from the city center, and that’s why we relocated to Yizhuang.
In 2009, we signed an agreement with Yizhuang and built this building. It was our Phase 1 project, which consisted of three towers: A, B, and C. Combined, they could accommodate over 10,000 people, tightly packed up to 18,000.
Everyone knows what happened next. By 2014—five years later—on the very night we completed construction, finished the interiors, and moved in, our employee count had already surpassed 10,000. The buildings couldn’t hold everyone anymore.
So, we built a second phase. Many of you have been to JD’s second headquarters phase, where we constructed towers D, E, and F. Later, we built Campus 2 from Campus 1, then expanded all the way to Campus 4. Campus 7 became our residential project. We also have a logistics warehouse currently being completed. Altogether, our built area now covers about 30,000 square meters and can accommodate 100,000 employees.
In other words, from 1999 to 2020, over 20 years have passed, and the number of employees has grown ninefold from the 10,000 we originally envisioned.
Another story happened in 2003, during the SARS outbreak. I thought to myself, the world is full of unpredictable uncertainties—you never know what will happen the next morning.
In 2003, JD had only 38 employees, including myself. That year, we made a net profit of roughly 120,000 to 200,000 RMB. At the time, we had only 12 small shops, each just a few dozen square meters in size.
I felt there were so many people in the world in need of help. Since we had already become an organisation and were profitable, making a net income of around 200,000 RMB annually, I thought we should take on social responsibility. So after the SARS epidemic ended, I took all 38 employees to Jing Le County in Shanxi Province.
In 2003, Jing Le County was one of China’s top ten poorest counties, ranking second from the bottom. From the city to the county, there wasn’t even a paved road—only muddy ones. That year, we gathered all the employees and said: however many employees JD has in the future, we will adopt the same number of orphans. As of the end of Q1 this year, JD has 720,000 full-time employees (excluding part-time workers).
This quarter (Q2), we launched our food delivery business and hired a large number of couriers. Many of them are transitioning into full-time riders. So, Q2 may be the single quarter in my entire entrepreneurial career with the largest net increase in employees.
Compared to Q1, we added over 150,000 new employees in Q2. By the end of Q2, JD’s total workforce had reached approximately 900,000.
Of course, after 2007, we couldn’t find enough orphans to adopt. But JD Group has always upheld the promise we made 22 years ago—we’ve continued to donate that money consistently ever since.
4.On “Core Competitiveness”
In 2009, we made a major strategic decision—to enter the home appliance sector. At the time, all of our investors were opposed to it, just like they had been when we entered logistics back in 2007.
Because at that time, even Amazon hadn’t entered the home appliance market. JD was still a very small company, and players like Gome and Suning were massive—they were China’s largest and second-largest retail companies, respectively.
But why did we believe we could succeed? The core logic was this: I looked into the 2009 net profit margins of all Chinese home appliance brands. It was less than 2%—including Midea, Haier, and Gree. The industry average was around 1-point-something percent. Meanwhile, the two big retailers had net profit margins of 6%; Suning was as high as 6.5%.
Looking at their gross margins—17%, 18%. But I calculated that if we sold appliances online, we could bring the cost down to 6%. This meant I could achieve 80% gross margin just on cost savings. So we could afford to give consumers a 10% discount—and still be profitable. Of course, we wouldn’t give away all of it.
Because I firmly believe that, in this industry, brands create more social value than retailers. Brands take the risks. What they do carries greater value than what we, as retailers, contribute.
We believe retailers should only take one-third of the profit, and two-thirds should go to the brand owners. That’s the fair ratio. Only then can brands truly thrive.
Without strong brands, a country’s economy can never achieve quality growth. If a country forever relies on cheap, low-end goods and white-label products, the economy will never improve.
Because the factory owners who produce low-end goods don’t make much money either. They can only survive by squeezing their workers, unable to provide them with benefits or decent wages. Workers who are underpaid have no money to spend, so they can only buy low-end goods. The entire economy falls into a vicious cycle.
Therefore, we must allow brand owners to make more money. When they do, they’ll invest in R&D, create higher-quality products, hire more talent, and give better pay raises. When workers earn more, they’ll start buying branded goods. So for retailers, brands, consumers, and industrial workers—everyone wins.
Today, JD is the absolute number one player in the home appliance industry. Gome and Suning combined account for less than one-fifth of our scale. And if you look at China’s home appliance brands, their net profits now exceed 10%. Meanwhile, JD’s net margin in this space is just 3–4%, which means brand profits are twice ours. Back then, Gome and Suning were earning three to four times more than the brands.
Why did we believe we could succeed? Not because we were reckless or overly confident. It’s because we analysed the economic profit distribution along the supply chain. The total industry cost was around 15%.
Let me give you some numbers: the reason JD has survived to this day is because, in mainland China alone, we have 1,600 warehouses. Our logistics centers support more than 10 million SKUs on our own platform, and our inventory turnover cycle is just 30 days.
Anyone who truly understands retail knows what that number means. That’s our core competitiveness.
There are all sorts of labels the outside world puts on JD—most from people who don’t understand the business. But if you want to grasp JD’s real strengths, look at our costs. We are just like Costco and Sam’s Club: JD Retail’s total cost structure is only 10%. And we even manage our own logistics.
What does 10% mean in the retail world? Only five companies globally can operate at that cost level. Traditional supermarkets need 20%, and Gome and Suning need 15%. So how has JD reached this point? Behind it all is cost efficiency and service experience.
As of last year, our group’s total gross merchandise volume (GMV) exceeded RMB 4 trillion. Net revenue was RMB 1.1588 trillion. Net profit? Just over RMB 40 billion. Yet, our salary payments amounted to RMB 116.1 billion, and we contributed RMB 18 billion in social security benefits. Since 2007, over the past 18 years, we’ve paid more than RMB 100 billion in social insurance alone. All of this could have become part of my personal legal wealth—or JD’s net profits.
But JD has never taken that path. I’m not saying this to boast. Why JD does or doesn’t do certain things all goes back to our original dream as entrepreneurs: to earn profits legally and ethically.
Of course, profitability is necessary. A company that doesn’t make money is dangerous—it becomes a burden to society. So profit is essential. But we’ve truly managed to never make it our top priority. On this point, I can speak with confidence anywhere.
The food delivery industry has been developing for 15 years. We entered it on March 1st, and by June 15th, JD already had more than 120,000 full-time couriers. We’re currently onboarding 3,000 to 4,000 people every day. The biggest issue now is labor shortage. Our riders are spread all over the country, which poses a massive challenge to our HR team. It’s not that we don’t want to hire more full-time riders—it simply takes time.
Over the past 21 years since founding JD, everything we’ve done—why we do things differently, why we don’t follow others—has never been about showing off or being contrarian for its own sake. Even relocating our headquarters was driven by the belief that large corporations should not be situated downtown.
Imagine if JD, with 60,000 employees, were based in Chaoyang or Haidian District in Beijing. We alone would paralyse four or five surrounding neighborhoods—severely impacting city operations and daily life for residents. JD’s self-operated business has never sold counterfeit or grey-market goods. Never.
- On “Returning to JD.com”
I officially returned to work on November 6, 2023. Before that, I was mostly retired and barely involved in the company. Sometimes I wouldn’t attend any meetings for a week or two. For four or five years, I didn’t join any daily, weekly, or monthly meetings—only quarterly ones, held four times a year, which we called the Quarterly Business Review.
After I returned, nothing really changed at JD—it was simply a return to how things used to be. Our strategy went back to the fundamentals: experience, cost, and efficiency. These three words—“experience, cost, efficiency”—are what made JD successful. Provide the best experience, operate with the lowest cost. Of course, the lowest cost must never come at the expense of our employees.
And I’ll say this bluntly: without JD’s self-operated advantage, if we had adopted a pure platform model, we would’ve died long ago in the fierce ecommerce competition.
It was because of our self-operated model that we earned the trust of countless users—we’re still living off that legacy. I don’t want to squeeze employees; I want to raise salaries for the younger generation. For employees at mid-level management position and above, their salaries have basically doubled.
So the strategy must fully return to our roots. Experience and efficiency are being continuously improved. I believe that JD’s shopping experience—especially for self-operated products—has gotten much better compared to last year or the year before. As for cost, we are continuing to lower it through technology, particularly AI and robotics, without squeezing our employees.
Our inventory turnover cycle—I firmly believe we can optimise it down to 20–25 days. For JD, optimising by even one day would free up RMB 10 billion in cash flow. Five days would be RMB 50 billion in real money. Our payment cycle is 59 days, while for trillion-RMB retailers, the average is 120 days. It’s precisely because of our high efficiency that we don’t squeeze suppliers either.
- On “Retirement” and the “Big Boss Plan”
My first departure wasn’t truly a retirement. It was overly idealistic. In all of China, perhaps only a few companies like Haier and Midea have done well in succession planning.
So back in 2013, I had this idealistic vision. I was in my 30s, wondering whether we could become the first large internet company in China to successfully transition leadership to professional managers, rather than having the founder run it until age 85. If it’s time to retire, just retire. Let young people take over. Don’t pass it on to your children—go the professional route.
So I went to university to observe: if I left the company for a few months, would things fall apart? I was away for 8 months—didn’t return even once. At most, one phone call per week. I didn’t attend a single meeting during that time.
Turns out, things were fine. So in 2018, as I was nearing 50, I thought maybe I should begin retiring a few years early and start looking for a new CEO.
This time, I came back because Xu Ran (JD Group’s CEO) requested it. I told her, “Would you be willing to be the CEO and lead our team forward? You’re smarter than me, a few years younger, your English is better, and you’ve worked at PwC and other global firms—you understand governance and regulations better than I do.”
She said, “Boss, I have one request—you must come back and work with me for a few years, and walk through every part of the business with me.” She was being honest—she had never done retail or ecommerce before. She needed me to be fully involved, to coach her hand-in-hand, until she got the feel for it. After that, I would step back and focus full-time on international business. I hope one day I can hand over all of our domestic operations to her.
Looking back, my desire to retire also came from a lack of self-confidence. As you grow older, you start to doubt yourself. After graduating from university, I worked for a Japanese firm, but it was a small company in China—I didn’t gain much deep management knowledge. I never studied abroad.
When JD grew into a company of hundreds of thousands of people, I started to wonder: with such poor English, could I really lead the company to a global level?
Everyone, I believe, experiences doubt and confusion at some point. I certainly have. In those moments, you start thinking—can I find a more “global” way to solve this?
But looking back, I’ve come to realise—it’s not about one person. It’s about the team. My CEO, she’s got excellent English and everything else she needs—that’s enough. No one person needs to understand everything. So we emphasise collaboration.
Among the 17 members of our Strategy Executive Committee (SEC), some specialise in management, some in strategy, others in international business or have worked in global corporations for 10 or 20 years.
These 17 people must have complementary strengths. If they’re all strong in the same thing, it’s a disaster—they’ll clash. That’s why our current approach is to rely on teamwork, allowing members to balance and support one another.
To this day, I am only five layers away from our frontline staff. I’ve set a hard rule: as long as JD Group has fewer than 2 million employees, we will only allow five organisational layers. Many companies with just a few thousand employees already have six or seven layers. We still have only five.
So the essence of the “Big Boss” plan is to keep the organization flat and fully empower frontline teams.
For example, our site managers—the heads of our delivery stations—do not need to go through layer after layer of approvals. Especially for frontline operations, we fully empower store managers, site managers, warehouse supervisors, sorting center managers, and general managers of JD MALLs. The bigger the company gets, the more dangerous it becomes to have seven or eight departments interfering with a single decision—that causes execution to fail.
Strategy should guide culture, systems, and processes—that’s the role of top executives. Mid-level managers handle execution and, crucially, hiring. They need to select the right site managers, the right warehouse managers.
That’s not something top executives can manage directly—after all, we now have over 30,000 managers in the company.
For me personally—whether in moments of glory or darkness—I maintain a calm mindset. Stick to your principles. Do the things you believe are meaningful. Just keep doing them, no matter what others say.
Over the course of your life, you’ll see more, and your mentality will become more peaceful. You’ll no longer be as arrogant or say provocative things like before. Now, I just want to lead JD well.
At this point, JD no longer belongs to any one person. By the end of Q2, we have 900,000 employees. Behind those 900,000 are 900,000 families. If we can run JD well, give these families hope and dignity—that’s enough.
