Apr 08, 2022, 13:45
Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com appointed its president Xu Lei as chief executive officer (CEO) on Thursday as billionaire Richard Liu stepped down from the post.
Xu, who has worked at JD.com for over 10 years, will also join the board as an executive director, the Beijing-headquartered company said in a statement.
His appointment comes after several months of handling the day-to-day operations since last September, when he was promoted to the position of president from the role of CEO at JD Retail, JD.com's most popular business.
Founder Liu, whose given Chinese name is Qiangdong, will retain his title as the chairman of the conglomerate.
"I'll devote more of my time to JD's long-term strategies and future drivers as we continue to work on the most challenging yet valuable things," Liu said in the statement.
He also revealed that he'll focus on "mentoring younger management and contributing to the revitalization of rural areas."
Liu's step back marks the latest top job departure from China's big tech firms in recent years, following Pinduoduo's Colin Huang and ByteDance's Zhang Yiming.
The 48-year-old opened a shop in Beijing in 1998 and moved the retail business online six years later. It is where JD.com's majority revenues come from today.
In 2018, Liu was arrested for criminal sexual conduct in the U.S., which the company called an "unsubstantiated accusation," and later released without a charge of crime.
JD.com generated 951.6 billion yuan ($149.3 billion) in net revenues in 2021, up 27.5 percent from 2020, according to its latest earnings report.
The company went public on the Nasdaq in 2014 and registered its secondary listing in Hong Kong in 2020, where its health and logistics arms were later listed.
According to local media reports, the giant has recently cut over a thousand jobs, saying the layoffs were "normal optimization."
Source: CGTN
Online retail is just matching consumer by web catalog to supplier on a platform that enables online order, payment and delivery. Its value is thus derived from choice and convenience for the consumer and extension of market range from local to regional for the supplier.
The big e-commerce players recognize this so they try to diversify into other activities like mobile credits and electric vehicles. Rather than rattling the turf of other smaller players in those new areas, they should enter a new cooperative business model with them where they can share their bigger resources with the smaller startups so that the latter will rise faster.
After all, before they had become the titans of today, they were once very small too. Perhaps that vein of sentiment is what can characterize China's form of market capitalism.
That said, what's the next frontier? The world of commerce has moved from buying bricks to buying credits to buying liquidable assets to buying information leverage.
Since that chain seems to be moving from solid to liquid to gas, the next frontier could be buying sensory experience that leaves favorable imprints in the human memory. And by extension, extracting that memory and repackaging it to be sold elsewhere.
And the only mass-commoditized platform that can deliver the new commodity called 'experience' seems to be the metaverse. Maybe that's why Facebook changed its name to Meta but it has some reputation issues.
China is ahead in using AI to extend satellite surveillance. Which is really about optics. Which is a key component of creating metaverses just as photonic techniques can be used to edge new microchips.
Big e-commerce players should not rest on their laurels to just do online retailing. Everything that has been envisioned by science fiction can be turned into practical non-fiction.
But first start with each CEO, and one does not only mean private sector chiefs, stepping out of themselves, their past, their present, their mindsets about the future.
They need to re-educate themselves first on how the rest of the world can spring surprises so that they won't themselves be caught flatfooted.
It should be easy. Having already made it and with tonnes of peoples at their beck and call, they won't have to worry about making a living or the trivial travails of daily lives.
ren
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