BEIJING(AP)– The e-commerce billionaire who was jailed and released by Minneapolis cops is
a popular member of a Chinese tech elite who enjoy the beauty of movie stars in their homeland. Admirers know Richard Liu’s story well: The boy of peasants developed a Beijing electronic devices store into JD.com, China’s biggest online direct retailer, selling everything from clothes to toys to fresh vegetables. He attracted clients by guaranteeing authentic products in a market buffeted by scandals over phony and often lethal milk and other goods.
Like a pop star keeping fans as much as date, the 45-year-old Liu shares some information of his life on social networks, including his 2015 marital relationship to a lady 19 years his junior.
That celebrity indicated Liu immediately drew in attention when news broke that authorities in Minneapolis apprehended him Friday and launched him a day later.
JD.com stated he was wrongly accused and police discovered no misconduct. The company stated Liu was back in Beijing on Monday. A cops report stated the charge stemmed from a felony rape accusation but offered no details.
Liu, understood in Chinese as Liu Qiangdong, was the leading search topic online Monday, inning accordance with Baidu.com, the country’s most popular search engine. By Tuesday, he had dropped to No. 35 for the day however still was the most popular topic of the week.
Liu, with a fortune of $7.5 billion, becomes part of a generation of business owners who have actually created China’s web, e-commerce, smart phone and other technology markets given that the late 1990s. They consist of competing Jack Ma of e-commerce outlet Alibaba Group and Ma Huateng of Tencent, a video games and social media giant.
Admirers of their success make their memoirs and books on management best-sellers.
Liu has said his company strategy was based on bitter experience. He began a restaurant as an university student but said it stopped working due to the fact that staff members took from him.
In his 2nd try, Liu opened an electronic devices shop in Beijing’s university district in 1998. He said he was the community’s first merchant to use cost and avoid haggling over rates. He browsed the web in 2003.
“I felt this was an opportunity to establish a new type of service,” he told The Associated Press in a 2015 interview.
JD.com purchases directly from suppliers and provides utilizing a fleet of thousands of bright red electric delivery vans emblazoned with its logo design, an animation dog called Happiness. Its workforce of 158,000 consists of thousands of employees who monitor suppliers and item quality.
JD.com operates 486 storage facilities and says its chauffeurs can reach 99 percent of China’s population. It is explore shipments by drone to the most remote rural consumers.
With its own online payments system, JD.com is the equivalent of Amazon.com, Federal Express and Visa combined.
Alibaba, China’s most significant e-commerce business by overall sales volume, acts more like a shopping center, providing online platforms to merchants who deal directly with consumers. Alibaba likewise has actually begun to imitate JD.com by investing in product-handling operations and setting up anti-piracy and customer service units.
JD.com’s 2014 preliminary public stock offering in New york city was the most significant to that point by a Chinese company, though it was gone beyond by Alibaba later on that year.
The high cost of doing everything itself means JD has had a hard time to make a profit despite explosive sales development.
It reported a 2.2 billion yuan ($334 million) loss for the quarter ending in June while profits increased 31 percent over a year earlier to 122.3 billion yuan ($18.5 billion).
Regardless of that, JD has actually drawn in brand-new investors and partners. Google agreed in June to invest $550 million in the business. Tencent owns a 20 percent stake and Walmart nearly 10 percent after combining its having a hard time China online operation into JD.com.
While other companies welcome its strategy, JD.com is branching off in brand-new instructions including developing innovation the judgment Communist Party aspires to promote.
It opened an experimental automatic grocery store in Beijing without human cashiers and robotic warehouses with couple of workers.
___
This story has actually been fixed to show that Google is investing $550 million in JD.com, not $550 billion.
Leave a Reply