JD.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:JD) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Sandy Xu: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Thank you, Eddy. Our primary focus remains on enhancing our supply chain capabilities, establishing an open ecosystem and developing on-demand retail and other long-term capabilities. On-demand retail includes our recently updated Shop Now service, which is a key component of our new retail strategy. Our innovative retail business integrates our Pinpin community group-buying business, distributed warehousing, and 7Fresh. Its main purpose is to create synergies within our supply chain operations. Currently, we are in the experimental phase, testing different models to enhance synergies in supply chain and to generate a higher revenue to meet customers’ demand and improve their shopping experience.

Even when the business model proved viable in certain markets, we still will take a step-by-step approach and to test it city-by-city. So, the overall investment is manageable. It won’t affect our expectations for the full year profitability. Yes, I think [the English] (ph) should be, to generate higher synergy instead of higher revenue. So, scale is not our top priority for these new businesses at this stage.

Sean Zhang: Thank you, Eddy. Okay. Let’s take the last question, please.

Operator: And that question comes from Kenneth Long with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Kenneth Long: [Foreign Language] Thank you management for taking my questions. My first question is that we noticed that the e-commerce platforms are increasingly use low price strategy as a key focus and a key initiative. Users are more frequent to compare prices among different platforms. And platforms are also becoming more commoditized and similar. How would JD differentiate going forward? And how should we think about the development for the overall China e-commerce industry going forward? And my second question is that we noticed that we are re-entering the community group purchase. Can you share with us the strategy? And how it will differ from Jingxi that we invested before? Thank you.

Sandy Xu: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] So, thank you, Kenny. At JD.com, we have constantly focused on strengthening our differentiated competitiveness. So, our core advantages lies in our supply chain based business model. By continuously developing our capabilities on supply chain and user experience, we can guarantee high-quality, low price and reliable product supplies. And also we can effectively matching products with our users, creating a superior sharing experience and further building users trust in JD.com. And we also want to reiterate that for not only e-commerce but all the retailers from day one of our existence, our core competitiveness or the assets of our business is the low price. So that’s why we have always anchored on our business philosophy on cost efficiency and customer experience.

So in fact, actually, we’re very welcome and we’re looking forward to welcome our users to compare prices across platforms before they place the order decisions as we are very confident in our supply chain capabilities and the low price and high-quality services we can provide based on our distinct 1P services, which benefit from our scale advantages. So as I introduced earlier that we continue to focus on strengthen users’ mindshare towards our superior selection, speed, quality and value offering. So, now we want to leverage our established advantages in speed and quality, while at the same time, we’re continuously working on expanding our platform ecosystem by attracting more merchants and enhancing its diversity and richness, this will enable us to cater to more verified demand of our users to work on more on the selection and value part.

So at the same time, we have made significant efforts to ensure and improve the user experience, including: first, maintaining efficient management for merchants’ entry and product management; and secondly, continuously enhancing the scale effect of our 1P business to drive down procurement costs and pass on the benefit to users, in the meantime, raising the standards of our 1P services to ensure the best user experience; and lastly, emphasizing on the core criteria of product, price and service in our platform operations. With regards to Pinpin, we have mentioned previously, our community group-buying business and the team have maintained its presence throughout. Following our business optimization last year, Pinpin has shifted its focus to Beijing and the surrounding regions.