JD.com, Inc.
Company Background
JD.com is China's No. 2 e-commerce company, behind the Alibaba Group Holding. It was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Beijing. When the company went public on the U.S. Nasdaq market in May 2014, it raised $1.78 billion, the largest sum ever garnered by a Chinese company in an initial public offering in the U.S. Richard Liu Qiangdong, who graduated from Renmin University of China, in Beijing, in 1996, started the business. It began as a sales agent for CD-ROMs. The company became an online mail-order house in 2004. It expanded its business as the Internet and rising incomes took hold in China.
As Alibaba is by far the largest player in China's online retail market, JD.com enlisted the help of Tencent Holdings, one of China's big three Internet players and the operator of the wildly popular WeChat app. JD.com hopes to woo some 400 million WeChat users. Tencent purchased a stake of about 15% in JD.com in the spring of 2014.
In May 2015, JD.com bought a 27.5% interest in the operator of a major Chinese travel website for $350 million and became its leading shareholder as part of a strategy to expand into new business sectors.