Richard Liu Qiangdong on JD.com’s Incredible Shipping Speed
The man currently increasing the speed of Chinese shipping to less than 20 hours for all products purchased, even including rural areas of China, is Richard Liu Qiangdong of JD.com.
In a recent interview entitled “An Insight, An Idea with Richard Liu” on weforum.org, Richard Liu Qiandong responded about the state of Chinese businesses, his wealth, goals for expansion into other countries, possible barriers to more immediate success, and many other topics ranging from family to President Trump.
Richard Liu started has recently invested $400 million into luxury fashion site Farfetch but is focusing most of his energy into expanding into Southeast Asia and increasing the quality of existing services in China. For example, in Thailand, the goal is to work with local partners instead of building from scratch.
The economy in China grew over 8% over the 14 years while JD.com grew over 100% per year. This has made way for increasing quality in partners, users, supplies, and better profitability to shareholders. Richard Liu started out life as a poor boy living in rural China. His parents could barely make ends meet and couldn’t support their sickly grandmother, and so growing all that Richard Liu wanted to do was to be able to help his family out. In this way, he went to the big city of Beijing in order to go to college as most young adults do. Read This Article for related information.
Richard Liu got a degree in sociology from Renmin University and continued on that path to get his masters from the China Europe International Business School in Beijing. This allowed him to get a job working for Japan Life, where Liu’s entrepreneurial brain kicked in and he started selling computer parts and cellphones for a profit. The company got so good that it grew into over ten locations, but once SARS hit in 2004 it forced Richard Liu to sell online, and this was his biggest blessing yet.
Related article: https://chemistry-buchwald.mit.edu/people/richard-liu