60 | FORBES ASIA NOVEMBER 2016

FORBES ASIA

CHINA’S 100 RICHEST

RICHARD LIU

Delivering

the Goods

Online retailer JD.com is in a cutthroat contest

to woo China’s increasingly sophisticated

consumers. Its dynamic founder believes

his business model will win.

BY MICHAEL SCHUMAN

R

ichard Liu, the founder

and chief executive of

Chinese online retailer

JD.com, arrived at the

daily 8:30 a.m. execu-

tive meeting late last year an unhappy

customer. He had ordered ice cream

on JD’s Internet shopping mall and, to

his dismay, it arrived slightly melted.

He would have none of such slapdash

service. There would be no further ex-

pansion of that company’s new grocery-

delivery business, he announced to the

assembled executives, until the prob-

lem was fixed.

The remainder of the 30-minute

meeting was consumed by the ice-

cream conundrum. (In the end JD

stufed more ice packs into the shipping

containers.) For strategy oicer Laura

Xiong, who had joined JD only a few

months earlier after 23 years at Procter

& Gamble, the session was an eye-

opener about her new boss. “I was very

surprised,” she says. “He is so deliberate

on these types of things.”

To Liu, though, it was just another

day at the oice. He places at least two

orders each day on his shopping site to

continually monitor the promptness of

delivery, the sturdiness of the packaging

and the quality of the product. “As CEO,

who says that the customer always

comes first, you yourself have to be the

most loyal customer, and you should

experience the service of your own

company all the time,” he told FORBES

ASIA at JD’s glistening new three-

towered Beijing headquarters in a rare

interview. “If you don’t, the company’s

values will be regarded by employees as

just empty slogans hanging on the wall.”

That persnickety approach is serv-

ing JD well. Its revenue is expected to

rise by 30% this year, to $37.5 billion,

according to an average of analyst es-

timates compiled by Bloomberg. The

number of active customer accounts

jumped 65% in just 12 months, to 188

million at the end of June. Such explo-

sive growth is helping Nasdaq-listed JD

catch up with its bigger rival, Alibaba.

The amount of stuf sold over JD’s retail

platforms in China surged by 84% last

year, to $68.9 billion, while at Alibaba

that figure increased by only 27% in its

fiscal year ended in March.

This has made Liu, 42, one of Chi-

na’s richest entrepreneurs. He was born

in the poor town of Suqian in eastern STEFEN CHOW FOR FORBES