JD.com’s London ambition is a test of whether Chinese retail can win over Britain

For years, JD.com has been an immense presence in China and a near invisible one in Britain. That may now be changing. The ecommerce group, the country’s biggest retailer by revenue and the world’s second largest online retail business after Amazon, is spending heavily to establish itself in the UK and on the Continent, betting that British consumers will be persuaded by a familiar formula of low prices, rapid delivery and a more exacting standard of customer service than many shoppers have come to expect online.

The scale of the company is striking. From its headquarters in Beijing’s Yizhuang district, a campus of seven high-rise buildings spread across 220,000 square metres, JD.com operates with the confidence of a corporation that sees itself not merely as a retailer but as an infrastructure business, a logistics network and, increasingly, a global brand. Some 60,000 people work at the Beijing site alone, moving through a small city of desks, food stalls, pharmacies, gyms and shops. Across the wider group, more than 900,000 people are on the books. Last year, JD.com turned over $187 billion, a reminder that the company’s home market is vast enough to sustain habits of scale that may prove difficult to transplant abroad.

Yet Britain is no longer simply a place to sell into from afar. JD.com has been buying warehouses, building logistics capacity and recruiting executives from British supermarkets. It has spent £37 million on a new office in Westminster and launched Joybuy, its own retail brand, in March. Its trucks can already be seen in London, and the company is advertising same-day delivery for orders placed before 11am and next-day delivery for those made before 11pm. In a market where Amazon has long set the benchmark and where consumers are increasingly impatient with both price and speed, JD.com is positioning itself as an alternative rather than a novelty.

The business is not entering from a position of ignorance. In China, JD.com has more than 700 million customers and a reputation built on operational discipline. It sells everything from dishwashers and smartphones to groceries, and has used the reliability of its delivery network as a competitive weapon against rivals. Sandy Xu, the chief executive, who was promoted from chief financial officer in 2023, says Europeans are “entitled to better services”, an argument that is as much a challenge to incumbent retailers as it is a sales pitch. In the company’s telling, the problem is not that people are unwilling to shop online; it is that too many retailers have become complacent about what good service should mean.

Xu’s remarks are revealing because they show how JD.com wishes to present itself to Western consumers: not as an outsider trying to exploit low-cost production and weak regulation, but as a serious retail operator with local employment, local tax payments and local infrastructure. She has been at pains to stress that the company hires locally, builds logistics networks locally and does not sell counterfeit products, which she describes as a basic operating principle. That pitch is clearly designed to distance JD.com from the reputational damage inflicted on Chinese ecommerce by firms such as Shein and Temu, whose business models have triggered criticism over tax loopholes, shipping practices and supply chain standards.

There is, however, another side to this story. JD.com’s international push is not taking place in a vacuum. It comes at a moment when growth in China is slowing, the housing market remains troubled and household spending is under pressure. For large Chinese firms, overseas expansion is increasingly a hedge against a more cautious domestic consumer. JD.com’s decision to push westwards is therefore not just about ambition. It is a response to vulnerability at home. That helps explain why the company appears willing to spend heavily and wait patiently. It can afford to sacrifice profits in pursuit of market share, as it has done in China’s food delivery sector, where price competition has already pushed the group to a quarterly loss for the first time in nearly four years.

The company’s founder, Liu Qiangdong, remains central to its mythmaking, even if the day-to-day leadership now lies with Xu. Known in the West by his English name, Richard Liu, he is often cast as Beijing’s Jeff Bezos: a self-made founder who rose from poverty in Jiangsu province to create one of the most formidable retail operations in the world. He launched JD.com in 1998 as a small electronics retailer in Beijing and later expanded into ecommerce during the Sars outbreak, when lockdown conditions made online selling a lifeline. The experience convinced him of the enduring utility of internet commerce and helped shape a company culture obsessed with speed, logistics and control.

Liu is also a figure of controversy and contradiction. In 2018, he was accused of sexual assault in Minnesota by a student, allegations he denied. Prosecutors did not proceed with a criminal case, though civil proceedings followed and were later settled. At JD.com headquarters, his image is carefully curated. Visitors can see shrine-like reconstructions of the small apartment from which the company was launched and the counter of the first shop. Such displays may strike some Western observers as faintly theatrical, but they reflect a deeper truth about Chinese corporate life, where founder narratives often serve as moral as well as commercial guideposts.

That same paternalism runs through JD.com’s management style. Liu has long been outspoken about work ethic, once attacking “slackers” and promising to weed out poor performers. He is said to have set an alarm to ring every two hours through the night during the company’s formative years, in order to ensure customers could be served around the clock. Yet he has also adopted a more protective posture towards his workforce than many Western executives would recognise. He has called employees “brothers” and pledged that JD.com will not dismiss front line staff whose jobs are replaced by robots. More recently, he said thousands of workers would be retrained because there will come a day when couriers are “basically no longer needed”. There is a practical wisdom to this, but also a distinctly paternal tone: the company will modernise, but on its own terms.

For British observers, the deeper question is whether JD.com’s model can travel. In China, it operates not just as an online marketplace but as a broad consumer ecosystem. Alongside ecommerce, it runs physical JD Malls, a small number of 7Fresh supermarkets, and a large healthcare arm that offers 24-hour consultations and rapid drug delivery to 200 million annual customers. That diversification gives it resilience and creates multiple touchpoints with customers. In Britain, by contrast, it is attempting to enter a mature market where the growth prospects in non-food retail are limited and where consumers already have strong habits. The company’s chances of success may depend less on whether its offer is good, which it probably is, than on whether it can persuade shoppers to switch.

That is not a trivial challenge. Amazon’s dominance has made convenience feel like a baseline rather than a differentiator. British consumers may welcome lower prices and faster delivery, but they are also sceptical, price-sensitive and likely to be suspicious of any promise that looks too glossy. JD.com’s answer is to localise aggressively and avoid the errors that have plagued other Chinese entrants. Its leadership insists that it is not trying to circumvent standards but to meet them. Xu has argued that many European consumers would welcome high-quality Chinese ecommerce brands and that the company already works with global names such as Samsung and Bosch, alongside lower-cost Chinese brands including Hisense.

The launch of Joybuy is therefore more than a rebrand. It is an attempt to create a recognisable retail face for a company whose name may not yet mean much to British households. Liu has spoken of bringing 1,000 Chinese brands to Europe and securing exclusive product access from manufacturers. That strategy could appeal to consumers looking for value, though it will also sharpen the cultural and political scrutiny surrounding the company. A Chinese retailer entering the British market at a time of strained relations between London and Beijing cannot expect a warm welcome by default. The aborted attempt to buy Argos from Sainsbury’s, which ended after JD.com tried to renegotiate the terms late in the process, already damaged its standing in British boardrooms.

Its proposed €2.2 billion purchase of the German electronics chain Ceconomy may determine how far European regulators are willing to let the company expand. The European Commission is investigating the bid amid concerns that Chinese state subsidies could have allowed JD.com to overpay, an allegation the company denies. Xu has said the Chinese government would not subsidise a private company to acquire a business overseas. The argument may be legally tidy, but the political reality is more complicated. In Europe, large Chinese firms are often read through the prism of state power whether they welcome that interpretation or not.

JD.com knows this and has begun making the case that it is different from the better-known names that have attracted criticism. Its partnership with the China-Britain Business Council earlier this year was intended to open more channels for British manufacturers into China and to signal that JD.com wants to be seen as a bridge as well as a bidder. Even so, the public relations battle ahead is likely to be considerable. British shoppers may be interested in better prices and quicker delivery, but they are unlikely to abandon Amazon, or a retailer they trust, on the basis of corporate rhetoric alone.

There is also the broader retail context to consider. The UK non-food market is flat, as retail consultant Richard Hyman notes, and any company hoping to grow must take customers from someone else. That means JD.com is not entering a market with easy gains waiting to be harvested. It must fight incumbents, win trust, build awareness and absorb losses long enough to become meaningful. That is a demanding proposition even for a business of its size. The company’s recent willingness to endure short-term pain for long-term share suggests it understands this. The more difficult question is whether British consumers, and British regulators, will accept the premise on which it is built.

What JD.com offers Britain is not just another shopping app or delivery promise. It is a glimpse of how Chinese corporate power now sees the world: as a series of contested markets in which speed, scale and logistics can be mobilised across borders. For years, the company has been a giant at home and a stranger abroad. Now it wants to become familiar in Britain, with all the commercial opportunity and political suspicion that entails. If it succeeds, it will be because it has persuaded shoppers that Chinese retail can stand for quality as well as price. If it fails, it will be a reminder that in Britain, as in much of Europe, scale alone is rarely enough to overcome scepticism.