JD.com founder lines up next goal: beating Alibaba

Personal touch

From a modest background in Suqian, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, where his parents ran a small shipping business, Liu carries a calm demeanor and sports the first flecks of grey in his hair.

Every year, around the June 18 anniversary of his first company's establishment, Liu dons a red JD.com delivery uniform and personally delivers products to unsuspecting customers.

On Monday, Liu took to the streets of northern Beijing, near the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium, at the handlebars of one of JD's 3-wheel delivery scooters. At first berated by a guard for parking at the wrong entrance of the former Olympic village, Liu finally delivered an order of dog food to a bemused office worker on the third storey of an apartment block.

Investors can be sure Liu didn't miss any important decision-making while he was out - with majority control of voting rights, board decisions require his presence.

"The control provisions that Mr. Liu has are, in my view, truly unprecedented," said Raffi Amit, a professor of entrepreneurship and management at the Wharton School. "He has complete and unilateral control of the board, which in turn controls the company."

For Liu, there's no issue.

"For an entrepreneurial business experiencing high-speed growth, the more control a founder has the healthier it is," said Liu. "Investors think giving me control of the company will better protect shareholder interests - I can give them better returns."

Though currently dwarfed by Alibaba, JD.com has a powerful ally in Tencent, which took a 15 percent stake in JD.com in March and mapped out a strategy for cooperation.

The most valuable weapon for JD.com and Tencent is WeChat. The mobile messaging application, nearly ubiquitous on China's smartphones, has evolved into a potentially lucrative e-commerce platform that allows users to spend on the move.

Mobile e-commerce is surging: In the quarter ended March, mobile purchases accounted for 18 percent of the total. "I believe JD will definitely obtain the best market position in mobile e-commerce," Liu said.

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