The Vancouver Economic Commission (VEC) successfully hosted “Vancouver Welcomes JD.COM – Canada-China Business Forum” on Friday, July 28, 2017. A delegation of the Chinese e-commerce giant JD.COM officials led by Corporate Vice President Jerome Ma gathered with representatives from Canadian retailers and suppliers to discuss potential opportunities and challenges for collaboration between JD.COM – also known as Jingdong – and Canadian companies.

Yin Qiuhong, the event organizer, delivered a warm welcome speech. As the founding leader of Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Centre at VEC, Yin presented Vancouver as a great city for its outstanding achievements and great potential in environmental protection, science and technology, market, and human resources.

In his keynote speech, JD Vice President Ma summarized the advantages of JD.COM in the e-commerce company’s customer service, logistic efficiency, and the quality of its products. He stressed that JD.COM strives to satisfy customers’ needs and give them great experiences when shopping on the JD platform. This is the key to its success in its future endeavors, and the JD.COM self-operated logistics system is vital to reach this goal.

At JD.COM, employees enjoy wonderful welfare and comprehensive training, enabling fast and pleasant delivering experiences. JD.COM highly regards its middle-class customers, and delivers full value to them.

He emphasized that unlike some of its competitors, JD.COM has zero tolerance for fakes, ascribing modesty, honesty and integrity among its core corporate values, which is in line with Canadian qualities to be humble, honest and quietly capable.

As one of the biggest e-commerce companies in China, JD.COM has developed rapidly in recent years and is actively seeking expansion in overseas markets. Ma mentioned the cooperation already existing between Canada and JD.COM, and he indicated exploring great potential in many areas. He hoped businesses from both sides could take the opportunity and deepen their understanding with each other, and promote mutually beneficial trade between Canada and China.

Terence Tian, Senior Manager for Global Purchase Business Development, introduced the development of the world e-commerce market and of Jingdong. He pointed out: China's e-commerce market in 2016 is 714.58 billion US dollars, far more than the e-commerce market in the US, which is 394.43 billion US dollars in the same year. There are 688 million Internet users and 448 million online consumers in China; so one can say, China is the world's largest e-commerce market. Danlu Liu, Senior manager and Assistant of the Executives President also gave a speech, going further into details of the JD.COM achievements in logistic chains, global purchase features and cross-border cooperation, in-house brands and JD fashion.

Among those assembled at the “Vancouver Welcomes JD.COM — Canada-China Business Forum” were many Canadian entrepreneurs from local and national companies. On behalf of VEC, Yin thanked all participants, and introduced each representative to the assembly.
Kirsten Poon, vice president of Maple Horizons, shared her experiences and success on bringing a Canadian brand into Chinese market, citing organic baby food company Baby Gourmet as an example. She indicated the importance of market research and a true understanding of local demand, since the Chinese market might be very different compared with Canada.

For many entrepreneurs, cross-border e-commerce will be quite challenging at the beginning, involving issues such as different law and regulations in different countries, along with cultural differences, she explained. From this perspective, this would be a good starting point to establish partnerships with experienced companies like JD.COM, who has full knowledge of the market, and is stable.

Joseph Cooke, chairman and co-founder of Web Presence in China, shared “Rules of Thumb in Chinese E-Commerce” in his speech, adopting a great amount of data in e-commerce and internet marketing in China.

The speeches were followed by more on-site discussions in the warm atmosphere, resulting in a great success for the event. It is pointed out by Ms Yin Qiuhong: “JD.com is a good tool for our small and medium sized companies to get their brands out there in a vast consumer market. Once a product takes hold, the challenge is to be able to scale up, to satisfy the demand. This is a good problem to have, this is how companies grow. This is test run for JD to assess the potential of Canadian brands. If this takes off, we hope to see them having a physical presence here in Vancouver.”

A Brief Introduction of JD.com

JD.com formally involved in the field of e-commerce in 2004 and experienced a rapid growth in the past decade. In 2016, the company’s market turnover reached 939.2 billion yuan, making a net profit of 26.01 billion. Up to March 31, 2017, JD.com has more than 120,000 regular employees and its business consists of three components, including e-commerce, finance and logistics.

In May 2014, JD.com became a publicly traded company, listed on the US Nasdaq Stock Exchange. Ranking among the world’s top ten internet companies, JD.com is the first e-commerce platform giant that successfully listed on an American stock market. In July 2015, with its high growth rate, JD.com was elected into the Nasdaq 100 Index and the Nasdaq 100 average Composite Index.

In the field of e-commerce in China, JD.com and Alibaba Group have become China's undisputed two giants. However, the two have their own characteristics. Alibaba is more like a platform, while JD.com is featured by self-operated model. In this sense, JD.com is the largest self-operated e-commercial enterprise in China.

JD.com is committed to creating a one-stop shopping platform, serving hundreds of millions of families in China. With 3C, home appliances, consumer goods, apparel, home improvement, food and fresh produce, and especially with its JD New Pathway (B2B), it is leading the industry on all fronts to meet the diverse needs of consumers.