JD.com is a giant Chinese e-commerce firm, established on June 18th 1998. It introduced the "618" shopping festival in honour of its founding date, offering discounts and other enticements to shoppers in the run-up to June 18th each year. The festival has become a fixture of the Chinese retail calendar, with its promotional period starting earlier each year—beginning on May 13th in 2025, a week earlier than in 2024.
In February 2025 JD.com entered the food-delivery market, posing an immediate threat to Meituan, the market leader, and to Alibaba's Ele.me service. The move sparked a fierce price war across a business worth 1.6trn yuan ($223bn) in deliveries in 2024. Analysts expect JD's delivery service to lose 33bn yuan in 2025. JD hired new delivery drivers to get the service up and running.
During the tariff crisis of April 2025, JD.com announced it would buy 200bn yuan of goods meant for export to resell at home, as American tariffs on Chinese goods reached 145%.
A JD.com subsidiary was one of the firms selected for Hong Kong's stablecoin regulatory sandbox in 2024, experimenting with digital tokens for supply-chain financing and cross-border payments.
JD Health, JD.com's telemedicine platform, claimed 200m active users in the twelve months to June 2025, with an average of over 500,000 online consultations a day. Users can consult doctors by text or video.
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