JD.com Inc (京東) aims to create seven listed firms with market values of at least US$14 billion apiece, outlining aggressive targets spanning two decades as it wrapped its signature sales gala for this year with another record haul.
Sales volume during its “618” June online bargains event, which concluded on Sunday, reached an all-time high, the company said in a WeChat post yesterday.
The summer online sales event, in which larger rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) also participates, is an important barometer of Chinese consumer spending that is often compared with Black Friday and the Alibaba-created Nov. 11 event.
Photo: Reuters
Chinese retail sales grew 12.7 percent last month, but were down from April and less than projected. Along with disappointing data on unemployment and investment, that suggests the world’s second-largest economy is struggling to regain its footing.
JD launched a US$1.4 billion discounting program in March — hoping to lock in consumers and fend competitors such as PDD Holdings Inc (拼多多) and ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) ahead of a broader recovery later this year.
That spending spree in turn signaled to investors that JD might be placing a market share grab before profitability, helping wipe nearly 40 percent off its value since a peak in January.
However, it is also helping buoy growth at a critical time.
JD retail head Xin Lijun (辛利軍) told Bloomberg Television last week he expects the company’s core e-commerce business to accelerate this quarter after the company posted its lowest-ever pace of overall revenue expansion during the January-to-March period.
Over the weekend, JD also disclosed its longer-term vision for a sprawling business that spans logistics, healthcare, e-commerce and online finance.
It is targeting seven listed firms with a market value of at least 100 billion yuan (US$13.97 billion) each, the company said in a letter to employees.
JD already has several listed affiliates including JD Health International Inc (京東健康) and JD Logistics Inc (京東物流), both in Hong Kong. This year, another two subsidiaries — Jingdong Property Inc (京東智能產發) and Jingdong Industrials Inc (京東工業) — submitted listing applications to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
China’s No. 2 online commerce firm also aims to have three companies with sales exceeding 1 trillion yuan and net profit of more than 70 billion yuan, it said on Sunday.
It is to pay out more than 3 trillion yuan in salaries and benefits for frontline staff over the next two decades. The Chinese tech firm also plans to pay 100 billion yuan in taxes and provide more than 1 million jobs, while it is targeting five businesses to be included in the world’s top 500 companies.
“618 shopping festival preliminary reports from e-commerce platforms have been better-than-feared thus far, helped by platforms’ focuses on price competitiveness, increased small/medium-sized merchants participation and higher engagement from content,” Goldman analysts wrote.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS