As JD.com founder cuts pay to US$1 a year, Chinese e-commerce firm targets poorer rural customers

One of China's largest e-commerce firms is looking to grow its userbase with a massive expansion into the country's largely untapped rural market.

JD.com said it will expand its reach to 100,000 villages across mainland China by the end of this year, the Beijing-based firm's most aggressive market expansion since 2013, when it started its foray into lower-tier cities across the country.

The company's founder and chief executive, Richard Liu Qiangdong, also announced that he would be cutting his annual salary to less than US$1 per year, though he will be able to greatly expand his stock holdings in the profitable US-listed company.

American tech leaders like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk, as well as several Google executives, also claim incredibly small salaries from their companies while making huge returns on stock holdings.

JD's rural expansion will heat up competition with Tmall.com, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group's business-to-consumer operation, in the fast-growing market segment.

"We've made a lot of progress in the past year-and-a-half," Shen Haoyu, the chief executive at JD Mall, told analysts in a conference call late on Friday. JD Mall is the business-to-consumer unit of Nasdaq-listed JD, in which Tencent Holdings has a 15 per cent stake.