JD.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:JD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Lei Xu: I want to ask that, when we consider enter market is not purely dependent on its growth rate. We will be phasing out the demand of our users. We do see there are on-demand shopping users and shopping demand on the platform. If we jump through that, this will be a lot like an insufficient service base from JD. And also when we talk to our brand partners, we also received their demand to work with JD to help them to optimize their business based on on-demand business model and leveraging JD’s platform, our user base and our Big Data, et cetera, to provide them better support on the marketing side and the efficiency of our product supply. And just thirdly from our supply chain perspective, as you know that JD has a very strong B2C 1P model for supply chain and we do a good job on it.

But with the time goes by, we are diversifying our supply chain models, including our warehouse at the production zones and more. And for the on-demand retail, it’s new type of supply chain and we believe this is the necessary thing we need to do. And this is our criteria when we decide whether we want to do this model and whether we need to step up efforts on this model. And here I just want to repeat again, even though the three criteria I mentioned above and on that and we still go back to the point I mentioned in my remarks at the beginning of the call, we will still consider if this business model has built — can improve customer efficiency and good for user experience. In terms of user experience, whether we can provide differentiated service base in terms of client products and services.

So by meeting all these criteria, we will make our position to enter this market.

Sean Zhang: Okay. Next question please.

Operator: The next question is from Thomas Chong of Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong: Thanks management for taking my questions. My question is more about the future competitive landscape. Given that we have been seeing our peers are also spending aggressively in recently in a different sort of a marketing campaign, I just want to get a sense about from our strategic perspective, will we also step up our marketing spending if our competitors are spending aggressively, or will we still stick to our balanced approach on top line and profitability? I just want to get a sense on how we should think about our growth strategies in light of the dynamic landscape. Thank you.

Lei Xu: I’ll try to answer your question. Some part of your question is not very clear. So I just want to share that the differentiator of JD’s business model exists in our scalable supply chain and the certainties we can provide in the products supply chain. And we have been building €“ develop our core capabilities on supply chain and user experience and provide more certain and a quality shopping experience by quality and in overall quality of shopping with JD.com. So we see a relatively lower ratio of users coming to our platform to do this kind of like impulsive shopping and most of our usage comes here to do flash shopping or shop for their family. And so with JD per se, we are now traffic-driven e-commerce company. And in essence, we are a company based on our whole categories and we are transforming to a great numbers that will be developed based on running our users on our platform and to enhance the overall — their life cycle value, on our platform.