Chinese e-commerce tycoon apprehended in Minneapolis becomes part of celebrity tech elite– Twin Cities

BEIJING– The e-commerce billionaire who was detained and released by Minneapolis authorities is a prominent member of a Chinese tech elite who take pleasure in the allure of motion picture stars in their homeland.Admirers understand Richard Liu’s story well: The boy of peasants built a Beijing electronics store into JD.com, China’s biggest online direct retailer, offering whatever from clothes to toys to fresh veggies. He interested customers by guaranteeing authentic products in a market buffeted by scandals over fake and often deadly milk and other goods. Liu Qiangdong Like a pop star keeping fans up to date, the 45-year-old

Liu shares some details of his

life on social networks, including his 2015 marriage to a female 19 years his junior.That celebrity meant Liu immediately attracted attention when news broke that authorities in Minneapolis jailed him Friday

and launched him a day later.JD.com said he was falsely accused and authorities found no misbehavior. The company said Liu, who is studying at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, was back in Beijing on Monday. A cops report said the charge stemmed from a felony rape allegation however offered no details.Liu, known in Chinese as Liu Qiangdong, was the top search topic online Monday, according to Baidu.com, the country’s most popular online search engine. By Tuesday, he had dropped to No. 35 for the day but still was the most popular subject of the week.Liu, with a fortune of $7.5 billion, is part of a generation of entrepreneurs who have created China’s internet, e-commerce, smart phone and other technology industries given that the late 1990s. They include competing

Jack Ma of e-commerce outlet Alibaba Group and Ma Huateng of Tencent, a games and social networks giant.Admirers of their success make their memoirs and books on management best-sellers. Liu has said his service strategy was based upon bitter experience. He began a restaurant as an university trainee however said it failed because workers took

from him.In his 2nd try, Liu opened an electronic devices store in Beijing’s university district in 1998. He

said he was the area’s very first merchant to use price tags and avoid bargaining over prices. He went online in 2003. “I felt this was an opportunity to establish a brand-new type of organisation,”he informed the

Associated Press in a 2015 interview.JD.com purchases directly from providers and provides using a fleet of countless brilliant red electric delivery vans emblazoned with its logo design, an animation pet dog called Delight. Its labor force of 158,000 includes thousands of employees who monitor providers and item quality.JD.com runs 486 storage facilities and says its drivers can reach 99 percent of China’s population. It is try out shipments by drone to the most remote rural customers.With its own online payments system, JD.com is the equivalent of Amazon.com, Federal Express and Visa combined.Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce business by total sales volume, acts more like a mall, providing online platforms to merchants who deal directly with clients. However Alibaba likewise has begun to imitate JD.com by buying product-handling operations and setting up anti-piracy and customer support units.JD.com’s 2014 preliminary public stock offering

in New York was the most significant to that point by a Chinese company, though it was exceeded by Alibaba later that year.The high expense of doing whatever itself means JD has struggled to make a profit in spite of explosive sales growth.It reported a 2.2 billion yuan ($334 million)loss for the quarter ending in June while profits increased 31 percent over a year previously to 122.3 billion yuan( $18.5 billion ). In spite of that, JD has actually drawn in brand-new financiers and partners.

Google concurred in June to invest$550 million in the company. Tencent owns a 20 percent stake and Walmart practically 10 percent after merging 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 directions including creating technology the judgment Communist Celebration aspires to promote.It opened an experimental automatic supermarket in Beijing without human cashiers and robotic storage facilities with couple of workers.

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