‘No way out’: JD.com founder Richard Liu warns staff not to ‘lie flat’ as China’s e-commerce incumbents fall behind PDD
- ‘So many issues have emerged, certainly because I mismanaged,’ Liu wrote in response to an internal discussion among employees
- Budget retailer PDD has seen much faster growth than JD.com and Alibaba amid weak consumer sentiment in China
JD.com founder and chairman Richard Liu Qiangdong has urged his staff to take more proactive actions to fend off competition and fix management problems or else there would be “no way out” for the e-commerce giant.
The Chinese billionaire entrepreneur made those comments in a a thread on JD.com’s internal discussion board, where an employee listed out major challenges faced by the company, including inadequate support for third-party vendors and insufficient supply of low-price products on the platform.
“So many issues have emerged, certainly because I mismanaged,” Liu wrote. “I blame myself for it.” He added that he would not “lie flat”, although it would take time to make changes at a company that was “large, unwieldy and inefficient”.
Liu’s remarks were first reported by Chinese media LatePost. A person familiar with the matter confirmed the veracity of the content to the Post.
Some analysts believe that JD.com is plagued by issues such as a relatively small user pool compared to its rivals, high operating costs owing to its positioning as a high-quality service provider, and a complicated organisational structure that hinders strategy implementation, according to Zhuang Shuai, founder and chief analyst at e-commerce consultancy Bailian.
