Liu Qiangdong (Richard Liu)

For roughly four years after JD.com went online in January 2004, Liu kept a mechanical alarm that woke him every two hours so that he could answer every customer inquiry himself; he wanted, he has said, to know his customers and their needs closely.¹ Known in the West as Richard Liu, he is the founder and chairman of JD.com, China's largest direct-sales e-commerce and logistics company. Unlike a third-party marketplace such as rival Alibaba, JD.com buys, warehouses, and ships inventory itself, and owns JD Logistics, a major independent delivery network. Liu stepped down as chief executive in 2022 but remains chairman.

Background

Liu was born on March 10, 1973, in Chang'an village near Suqian, in Jiangsu Province. His family had once been wealthy shipowners moving goods along the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal, but by the time he was born they had been reduced to poor farmers. The village had no running water, electricity, or paved roads, and his diet was corn and potatoes, with meat once or twice a year. As a boy, he has said, he dreamed of becoming the village leader and providing pork more often to fellow villagers.

In 1992 Liu scored the highest Gaokao, or national college entrance exam, result in Jiangsu Province. He enrolled at Renmin University of China in Beijing, majored in sociology, and earned a Bachelor of Laws in 1996, later adding an MBA from the China Europe International Business School. When he left for university, 76 village elders each gave him a boiled egg, plus a collective 500 yuan for the train fare, an anecdote he has repeated for decades: "They donated a total of 76 eggs and 500 yuan to send me off for the opportunity that changed my life."² At Renmin he taught himself computer programming, rare in China at the time, and worked part-time coding jobs.

Getting started

In 1994 Liu used his coding income to open a restaurant near the Renmin campus. He did not manage it directly, staff embezzled, for example paying 2 yuan for bean sprouts while reporting 4 yuan, and the restaurant went bankrupt. Liu's stated takeaway was that the absence of financial controls, not bad luck, had caused the failure: "Trust, alone, is not a system."² From 1996 to 1998 he worked at Japan Life, a health-products company, as a logistics supervisor, paying off his restaurant debt and learning inventory operations.

On June 18, 1998, Liu founded the company with 12,000 yuan in savings, renting a four-square-meter stall in the Haikai Market in Zhongguancun, Beijing's electronics bazaar, selling magneto-optical drives. He named the venture Jingdong, combining a syllable from then-girlfriend Gong Xiaojing's name with his own. In a market built on counterfeits and haggling, he introduced fixed price tags, the first in the neighborhood, and guaranteed genuine merchandise. By 2001 he held roughly 60 percent of China's magneto-optical distribution market, his personal wealth had crossed 10 million yuan, and he had 12 electronics stores.¹

The pivot came in spring 2003, when the SARS outbreak forced store closures and losses over 8 million yuan, pushing management to sell online almost by necessity. His first forum post drew six orders after a longtime customer vouched for him as the only seller from whom he had never bought a counterfeit disc.² On January 1, 2004, Liu launched the Jingdong Multimedia website, writing the initial code himself. In 2005 he closed all 12 stores, went fully online, and rejected an 18 million yuan acquisition offer.

What he built

Liu chose a capital-intensive direct-sales model, in which JD buys, warehouses, and ships, over Alibaba's asset-light third-party marketplace, trading capital for tighter control of authenticity, quality, and delivery speed.³ In 2007 JD expanded beyond electronics into a full-category retailer. In May 2014 Liu led JD.com's $1.8 billion Nasdaq initial public offering, at the time the largest US listing by a Chinese internet company.¹ In 2021 JD Logistics was spun out and listed separately in Hong Kong. The founding date, June 18, became "618," JD's flagship annual shopping festival and China's second-largest after Alibaba's November 11 "Double 11." Liu stepped down as CEO in April 2022, remaining chairman. His reported net worth was roughly $4.9 billion (Forbes, 2023), and JD.com has generated well over $150 billion in annual revenue in recent years.

How he operates

Liu believes trust should be built through systems rather than sentiment, a lesson he draws directly from the restaurant failure. For roughly four years after JD went online, he set a mechanical alarm to wake every two hours and personally answer every customer inquiry, saying he wanted to know his customers and their needs closely.¹ He describes thin margins as a permanent condition: "From the first day of our business to now, there is no such phrase as 'windfall profits' in my dictionary."³ He frames the capital intensity of the direct-sales model as a discipline, arguing that limited funds forced JD to control product quality and delivery speed or lose customers to rivals.

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Liu is chairman, but not CEO, of JD.com, with day-to-day operations run by Sandy Ran Xu, who became chief executive in May 2023. He has been married since August 2015 to Zhang Zetian, a businesswoman known as "Milk Tea Sister," and they have two children. In a separate legal matter, Liu was arrested on August 31, 2018, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a rape allegation. Minneapolis police stated they found no substance to the claim, and Hennepin County prosecutors declined to file criminal charges in December 2018. No criminal charges were ever filed. A civil lawsuit filed by the accuser in April 2019 was settled out of court in 2022 on undisclosed terms.

Key facts

• Scored the top Gaokao result in Jiangsu Province in 1992, despite growing up in a village with no running water or electricity.
• On leaving for college, 76 village elders funded his train ticket with boiled eggs and 500 yuan, a story he still tells.
• Set a mechanical alarm to wake every two hours, for roughly four years, to personally answer every customer inquiry after JD.com launched online in January 2004.
• Chose the more capital-intensive direct-inventory and self-operated logistics model over a marketplace model, directly opposite Alibaba's approach.
• Led JD.com's 2014 Nasdaq IPO, $1.8 billion and the largest US listing by a Chinese internet firm at the time, and spun out JD Logistics via a separate 2021 IPO.
• Still works one day a year as a JD delivery driver.