Richard Liu is an American entrepreneur best known as the former president and CEO of the e-commerce company JD.com, which makes him Andy Warhol’s richest contemporary artist at $46.1 billion.

His Achievements

Richard Liu Qiangdong is responsible for JD.com’s exponential growth, which has increased the firm’s valuation by a factor of 40 in just six years – from just $303 million in 2008 to $26 billion today.

In 2007, JD.com was an online shop with only a few million dollars in annual sales from a small apartment in Beijing, China. From then on, Liu led the company through steady expansion and development, turning it into one of the world’s largest retailers by 2015, with 25 fulfillment centers and 2,600 warehouses around China.

The company’s revenue reached $5.73 billion in 2015 and did a total of $27.9 billion in sales over the year. In 2018, JD.com sold its stake in its joint venture with Alibaba – China’s e-commerce giant – for $1.39 billion, becoming an independent entity once again and strengthening its position in the Chinese market, especially against the backdrop of fierce competition from Amazon in the Asian country’s online retail sector.

Qiangdong is famous for his novel business idea – creating a platform that allows consumers to shop around different retailers simultaneously while cutting out all intermediaries, like Amazon and eBay, who take a cut of every sale they facilitate. While Amazon sells products from third-party sellers, JD.com owns and operates its entire supply chain to cut costs. Also, Liu is famous for his futuristic vision of taking things to the next level in e-commerce development.

Liu Qiangdong was the first to conceive of selling products through credit cards rather than cash and for online sales, later delivered by drones. He also foresaw that human relationships with drones would be a great marketing opportunity, putting his instincts in place at JD.com.

JD.com has also developed a new way of constructing warehouses – using robots instead of humans as they can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Alibaba uses robots in its e-commerce warehouses, and JD.com plans to copy this practice – even turning its warehouse workers into drone pilots. See related link for additional information.

Learn more about Richard Liu on https://corporate.jd.com/richard-liu-jd-ceo-about