Richard Liu is an ambitious and persevering self-made man. 

Although No. 2 in e-commerce in China, he can be proud of his impressive success story. Born in 1974 in Jiangsu Province, China, he grew up in a family that owned a modest river coal transport company.

Despite being a brilliant student, with real aptitudes in physics and chemistry, he was nevertheless pushed by his parents towards the human sciences in order to become a public servant.

The businessman added computer programming to his studies, which would become his new passion. During college, the entrepreneur accumulated student jobs and created an important network within the university. In 1994, Richard Liu borrowed a few thousand euros from his father and launched his first business, a restaurant near the university. Unfortunately, the establishment will go out of business a few months later. Disappointed and in debt but not discouraged, the entrepreneur joined the Japanese company Japan Life where he became IT manager. Once his debts were repaid, he started again. 

In 1998, he opened an electronics store in Beijing named Jindong (a contraction of his girlfriend’s first name and his) which was very successful and allowed him to develop rapidly.

In 2003, he was at the head of 12 points of sale. Its shift towards e-commerce, the key to its success, is quite surprising. In 2003, China faced an unprecedented epidemic, SARS, which forced Chinese people to stay at home. Jingdong was in bad shape and Richard Liu was forced to rethink business model. With emergence of internet and opening up of China, he consulted with his teams and decided to abandon traditional commerce and devote himself entirely to online commerce by launching 360Buy. Helped by developers, he conceptualized and developed his own information system. In 2008, the group diversified and became an online retail platform. In 2012, the company changed its name to JD.com, a return to its roots.
Unlike Alibaba, Richard Liu has chosen to position his platform in an upscale market with quality products and many imported brands, especially French, very popular in China. Customer satisfaction is one of the most important aspects. It thus applies a «zero tolerance to counterfeiting». Emergence of a middle and premium class over the past several years proves its concept. Finally, Richard Liu preferred to keep stocks and buy his products. The entrepreneur chose as model his American rival Amazon. He invested heavily in logistics with construction of warehouses across the country and deployment of an efficient delivery service by trucks, scooters and drones based on A.I. Thus, even the most rural areas have access to the products. 90% of orders are delivered within 24 hours. An efficiency that allowed the firm to pull out of the game during the health crisis, during which its sales jumped by 20%. Internet companies in China being faced with fierce competition, Tencent and JD.com have teamed up, the 1st being able to position itself in e-commerce and the 2nd increasing its number of buyers thanks to the 1Bn Wechat users. JD.com has also established a partnership with Walmart. The two giants now own shares in JD.com.

Already listed on Wall Street since 2014,JD.com is now listed in Hong Kong since June 18, 2020 with an impressive fundraising of $3.9Bn.

This date was not chosen at random and corresponds to the launch of its 1st store and its big promotional day. In June 2020, on this special day, hundreds of millions of consumers bought nearly $32Bn worth of products, a record. JD.com has made a shift towards luxury and consumer goods with investments in particular in the London firm Farfetch.  Richard Liu married in August 2015 to internet celebrity Zhang Zetian known as «Sister Milk Tea». Their daughter was born in March 2016.