Recently listed e-commerce giant JD.com (Nasdaq: JD) was making plenty of noise in the microblogging realm this week, as it hyped a June 18 promotion that it's trying to build as an alternative to Alibaba's wildly popular November 11 Single's Day event. Meantime, Xiaomi's talkative CEO Lei Jun was in a rare defensive posture on his microblog, discussing a recent major price cut as his company tries to meet the huge expectations it has set for itself. Last but not least, officials from Alibaba and its recently acquired UCWeb web browser unit took advantage of a recent controversy involving a massive fine against a Shenzhen company to criticize rival Tencent (
0700.HK) for wielding too much power on the Chinese Internet.
There's no real overriding theme to this week's tech talk round-up from the microblogging realm, which saw executives from top firms pursue their own agendas in the run-up to the slow months of summer. JD.com used the last official week of spring to talk up its annual June 18 promotional event, as it seeks to boost its profile following its IPO last month.
Probably the most memorable images from the event were numerous photos in the media of JD's founder Richard Liu, also known as Liu Changdong, riding around on a motor scooter delivering products to different places in Beijing. JD later reported its order intakes for the promotion doubled from year-ago levels for an event it first began in 2010.
The usually talkative Liu was uncharacteristically quiet on his own microblog, perhaps because he was too busy delivering parcels to tweet about the promotion. But other JD executives went into overdrive on their own microblogs.
Vice president Xu Lei led the charge with numerous posts that are
largely hype and not worth repeating here. In addition to promoting JD's own activities, Xu was quick to point out that other e-commerce rivals were holding their own events. Officials from both Suning (Shenzhen: 002024) and Alibaba both tweeted about their own promotions, giving a bit more credibility to June 18 as a
major sales event in its
own right. At the end of the day, other e-commerce firms can't complain too much since everyone prosper when online shoppers spend more.
Meantime, Xiaomi's Lei Jun was on the defensive after his company cut the price of its third-generation model by 25 per cent to 1,499 yuan (HK$1,884). Netizens speculated that Xiaomi was making the cuts to clear high inventory and to meet its aggressive target of selling 60 million smartphones this year.
