JD Logistics IPO expands the e-commerce empire of China’s largest retail company with third related public listing in nine months

Richard Liu Qiangdong, the billionaire founder of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, has applied to list his company’s delivery arm JD Logistics in Hong Kong, which will be the third public offering of his business empire within nine months.

The company has not specified the amount it hopes to raise, but JD.com is expected to raise about US$5 billion by floating shares of the logistics unit, with the total value of JD Logistics possibly reaching US$40 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg. That would make it China’s second-most valuable delivery company after Shenzhen-listed SF Express. This comes after JD.com’s US$4.5 billion secondary listing last June and a US$3.5 billion IPO by JD Health in December.

At the heart of JD Logistics is its 240,000-person strong army of deliverymen and service crew members, whom Liu has publicly referred to as “my brothers”. But the company also seeks to differentiate itself from the competition by selling itself as a more technologically advanced logistics company.

“Supply chain technology is the bedrock of our operations and differentiates us from our competitors,” the company said in its prospectus, published on the Hong Kong exchange website on Tuesday. The company said it is applying technologies “such as 5G, AI, big data, cloud computing and Internet of Things” to delivery jobs.

“JD is the only company building an integrated, on-demand, digitised and increasingly autonomous logistics infrastructure at this scale,” said Jeffrey Towson, professor of investment at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management in Beijing.

Spun off from JD.com in 2017, JD Logistics’ network includes over 800 warehouses across China, covering a combined area larger than 11 Victoria Parks, as well as a large fleet of robots, drones and autonomous vehicles, according to the prospectus.