Lei Xu
Analyst · Bank of America
Thank you, Ruiyu. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q4 earnings call. This is Xu Lei, CEO of JD Retail. I'm glad to take this opportunity today to share with you JD Retail's 2020 review and our outlook for the new year. 2020 was no ordinary year. We observed significant changes in the macro economy, the retail industry and the way our customers live their lives. The global pandemic greatly impacted society and everyone's lives. It also brought many uncertainties to the global economy. But great opportunities can be found amidst great challenges. With the profound changes in consumers' mindsets and behaviors during this period, China's online retail penetration continues to deepen. Consumers' needs, attention, spend, contact forms and means of communication, all underwent many changes. Consumer's demographics and use cases became increasingly segmented and diversified. The lower tier market, the silver economy, the users who were born after 1990s and the year 2000, the community economy, the on-demand consumption and many more engaging trends have presented us a wide range of growth opportunities. In the face of these challenges and opportunities, JD's business model has proven to be resilient through different economic cycles. We adopted a more open approach to running our business and continuously enhance our ability to enable our business partners. Our long-standing business philosophy of noble principle of doing business served as our true north in navigating the uncertainties and changes. All these efforts have helped us to gain the trust of many more users and business partners. Over the past year, we have not only successfully withstood the challenges, but also seized the opportunity for further growth and iteration. JD.com delivered a strong set of financial results in 2020. This is mainly attributable to our continuous investment, improving our users' experience and also always put our customer first in running our business. By the end of Q4, we hit a new high with annual active customers for the past 12 months reaching 472 million. We saw accelerated user growth and added 110 million new active customers compared with a year ago. This is the largest expansion in our history. We continue to see exciting user growth in the lower-tier cities, which contributed over 80% of our new users for the first time in Q4 2020. We're even more delighted to see increased engagement from our customers. For example, the ARPU value or the ARPU from our 2015 customer cohorts increased more than 5x by 2020. And we also see a very active engagement of our JD Plus members. In 2020, we maintained healthy growth in our core businesses and achieved significant progress in new business initiatives. JD Retail is JD's earliest and most mature core business. It plays a fundamental role in JD achieving its long-term strategic goals. We are pleased to say that in the past year, JD Retail realized high-quality and accelerated growth and meaningful and sustainable innovation. Looking ahead in 2021 and beyond, as a supply chain based technology and service provider, JD Retail will continue to focus on 3 key strategies: enhancing our middle platform capacities for supply chain and technology, our omnichannel strategy and our online marketplace ecosystem. First, on the middle platform for supply chain and technology, JD has been investing intensively in the building of supply chain infrastructure for a long time. At the end of 2020, we managed more than 7 million SKUs of our direct sale products in over 900 warehouses across China. During COVID-19, supply chain has impacted the development and cooperation among industries and enterprises around the world. The need for reliable supply chain is all the more imminent in an environment of increased uncertainties. What JD aspires to do is to build a middle platform ability that can be applied in more diverse use cases and channels. With this goal in mind, we have been investing unswervingly in supply chain and technologies to help merchants, both online and off-line, big and small, including brands and factories, to improve their operational efficiency, to enhance their customers' experience and to improve their risk resistance capacity. This will also help promote high-quality growth of the whole industry and create value for the entire society. For JD, this endeavor will further diversify our revenue stream and drive our service revenue in the future. Second, in face of a broad range of business channels and use cases, our omnichannel strategy aims to increase the overall retail efficiency to satisfy customers' diverse needs to provide people with immediate access to products and services and to create value for merchants and customers. Our omnichannel business is complementary to JD platform's main retail model. Omnichannel is not only a key strategy for JD, but also a new trend that all the retailers must address. The penetration rate of this model is still quite low among off-line businesses. We believe that there is a huge potential to integrate omnichannel and on-demand fulfillment element with many industries in the future. Today, JD's omnichannel business has already covered various off-line scenarios ranging from shopfront type of stores, convenience stores, car maintenance stores, fresh groceries and fresh flowers to pharmaceuticals connecting with millions of off-line stores. In future, based on our unique supply chain and technology ability, we will develop LBS-based technologies tailored to the on-demand consumption market. We will also continue to build up our omnichannel supply chain, omnichannel marketing and off-line store digitalization abilities to support their applications in many more industries, businesses and scenarios. Meanwhile, we will work on cultivating customers' market share of on-demand fulfillment through innovative measures, such as our omnichannel fulfillment initiative and cooperation with external partners such as the partnership between JD Retail and Dada Group. In 2021, we will expand our coverage to more retail verticals and drive the quality growth of our omnichannel business. This will provide us additional monetization opportunities. Third, on the building of an online market ecosystem, this is an area of great potential for JD. With several years of development, we have now established a good foundation for the online platform ecosystem. Notably, we have made good progress in building a healthy platform environment and improved the merchants' quality and user experience. We are pleased to see that the NPS, Net Promoter Scores, of our online marketplace continues to improve over the year. So far this year, our merchants' renewal rate is much higher than in the past, reflecting a significant improvement in merchant satisfaction and recognition of our platform. Looking ahead, capitalizing our healthier industry environment, we will continue to experiment with new models and strategies to find the optimal strategies for JD's online marketplace. These attempts will still be guided by JD's ultimate business purpose to improve customers' shopping experience and provide an open and empowering platform for merchants. While adhering to these strategic directions, we will continue to underpin our business foundation, keep an open mind, incubate new business and use innovation to face change. Whether it is our first-to-growth curve represented by our established business such as consumer electronics and consumer goods or our second growth curve represented by our growing business such as health care and MRO categories or the third growth curve represented by emerging business such as retail innovation, service and technology initiatives, JD Retail can always identify and incubate new growth opportunities. Here, I would like to emphasize JD's strategic positioning as the supply chain based technology and service provider. We uphold our long-term business philosophy. Since day 1 of JD's business, we chose to tackle the hardest, but most valuable problems in the industry and society. No matter how far we have come, as long as we remain committed to our customer-first core value and supply chain based value creation, we'll always be able to go full steam ahead. This attitude embodies our long-standing business philosophy that is the noble principle of doing business. The road ahead is long and winding, but taking 1 step ahead, we will preserve. We believe the core values and mission that JD has been abiding by are relevant to the new microenvironment and industry development. JD will continue to innovate and invest in these strategic directions. We will constantly and continuously deliver operability and creates value for society, industries, our partners and our customers, and in turn, achieve long-term high-quality growth at JD. Thank you for your time. I'll now give the floor to our CFO, Sandy.