The Paypers

JD is known in China for its claim to one-day or next-day delivery service, which helped drive a year-on-year increase of 18.6% to 362 million annual active customer accounts in 2019. The company is now trying to build on the delivery and retail network with a new line of business in technology services, which covers logistics, advertising, and cloud computing. China is the world’s second-largest market for cloud infrastructure services, of which Alibaba Cloud accounts for 46.4% of total spend, followed by Tencent Cloud at 18%, and Baidu AI Cloud at 8.8%, as of the fourth quarter.

The company aims to work with Fortune 500 companies that want to grow their operations in China, as well as help US and European technology companies’ products enter China. For JD, technology services sold to clients are based on applications for the company’s own operations, and cover artificial intelligence, big data, cloud, devices, and ‘exploration’ of new applications. Thus, JD Cloud and AI officially became one of the company’s business lines on 5 March, joining JD Retail, JD Logistics, and JD Digits.

Moreover, JD.com is backed by Tencent, and the online retailer received a USD 550 million investment from Google in 2018. It also has a strategic alliance with Walmart, which invested USD 500 million together with JD in the Chinese company’s affiliate Dada, which runs an online fresh produce delivery platform.

Ecommerce giant JD.com aims to surpass its rival Alibaba