After nearly a month of momentum, the "JD.com's first car" was finally unveiled, with more than 100,000 people booking a test drive on the first day of listing.

Since JD.com announced takeaway in February this year, this is at least the ninth new business in JD.com's layout. From takeaway to building a seven-fresh kitchen, selling coffee, to developing wine and tourism, supplementing the evaluation system, opening discount supermarkets, opening medical beauty stores, and acquiring overseas e-commerce platforms...... JD.com has a tendency to redo all industries.

In the view of the alphabet list, JD.com is attacking everywhere, on the one hand, it is looking for increments, and on the other hand, it is the phenomenon of "scene emergence" that appears after entering the blue ocean market.

Similar to the "emergence of intelligence" often mentioned in the field of AI, when large companies enter new markets, they will not only give birth to new capabilities, but also continuously trigger new needs and scenarios. The spillover capabilities and technologies of large companies have the possibility of transforming new scenarios into growth drivers.

This trend has been confirmed in JD.com's financial report. In the third quarter, JD.com's revenue was 299.1 billion yuan (about $42 billion), a year-on-year increase of 14.9%.

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It is worth noting that in this quarter, the revenue of new businesses such as JD.com's takeaway more than tripled year-on-year to 15.59 billion yuan, and the investment narrowed month-on-month.

At the same time, new businesses are blooming everywhere, and they continue to inject new traffic into JD.com. As of October this year, the number of JD.com's annual active users exceeded 700 million, and the number of users reached a new high.

However, whether these new businesses can break the ceiling of JD.com's growth still needs time to be tested.

A

In the past few years, "low price" and "refund only" have become industry keywords, and platforms and merchants have continued to involut in the price war of a near-zero-sum game, and the growth ceiling is clearly visible.

"The stock is dead, and the increment should be established" has become the new consensus of the current e-commerce industry.

When the horizontal share competition is deadlocked, vertical deepening has become a new way out. Instant retail, which is not only close to the last mile of users, but also closer to the main e-commerce business, has become a new blue ocean that needs to be cultivated urgently.

For Internet giants, the development of new markets is often accompanied by "scene emergence". Just as "intelligent emergence" is an independent breakthrough and evolution after technology accumulation to a certain stage, "scene emergence" also arises in large companies with a huge user base, technical reserves and infrastructure.

Both are the inevitable result of the spillover of existing capabilities.

Meituan's extension from takeaway to "infinite war", and the continuous horizontal expansion of Alibaba's ecology are all manifestations of this law.

JD.com is a typical representative of this round of "scene emergence". For JD.com, embracing these new scenarios is not only an inevitable action to tap into the blue ocean of growth, but also the only way to build the minds of users.

"Seven Fresh Kitchens" is a typical product of this. At the beginning of February this year, JD.com entered the food delivery market, first recruiting riders to enhance their performance capabilities, and then leveraging merchant resources with "0 commission".

Industry problems such as "ghost kitchens" and opaque ingredients have become the entry point for JD.com's ability to spillover. At the end of July, JD.com launched Seven Fresh Kitchen, recruiting catering merchants and brands to participate in the development of dishes, and JD.com is responsible for the raw materials, rent, manpower, operation and other business links of the entire store, and the two enjoy the share of sales results.

"Seven Fresh Kitchens" not only brought to JD.com, but also strengthened the user mentality of its "quality takeaway", which can be described as twice the result with half the effort to drive JD.com's takeaway business.

In addition, the "emergence of scenes" is driving JD.com's expansion from takeaway to areas where the core needs of users have not yet been fully met, such as wine and tourism, offline discount supermarkets, and medical aesthetics.

Embracing the strategic value brought by the new scenario, even beyond the financial contribution of the new business itself, is reflected in the synergy and pull of JD.com's overall business.

New business directly drove the growth of platform service revenue. According to the financial report data, JD.com's service revenue in the third quarter increased by 30.8% year-on-year, a new high in the past two years, and the proportion of revenue also increased to a record high of 24.4%.

More importantly, new businesses form synergies with core retail businesses. According to JD.com executives at the performance meeting, the conversion rate of new users brought by takeaway has increased month by month, and the conversion rate of the earliest batch of takeaway users to other businesses has been close to 50%.

B

The "emergence of scenes" seems to be sudden, but in fact it is an inevitable outbreak after the core capabilities of enterprises accumulate to the threshold. This is consistent with the logic of intelligent emergence, which is also inseparable from the accumulation of massive data and the continuous iteration of algorithms.

For enterprises, this set of core capabilities must not only stabilize the basic market of the main business, but also have the characteristics of migrating and reusability, in order to quickly adapt to new scenarios and help new businesses gain a firm foothold from 0 to 1.

What supports JD.com to attack everywhere is its super supply chain system.

In the more than 20 years of development, JD.com has accumulated core assets far more than front-end APPs, but also warehousing and distribution networks covering the whole country, direct procurement channels to manufacturers, and key supply chain digital capabilities.

Previously, these resources were only used for the distribution of main categories such as home appliances, digital, and daily necessities, and the value was not released enough. Nowadays, the cross-border reuse of core competencies not only improves the utilization efficiency of fixed assets and dilutes operating costs, but also enables the rapid implementation of new businesses due to scale effects.

From the perspective of the takeaway business, JD.com did not fall into the subsidy melee of "zero yuan purchase", but chose a more "heavy" path - opening a seven-fresh kitchen, although the model has become heavier, the pricing has not risen, and a single meal still remains in the range of 10-20 yuan.

Behind it is its supply chain capabilities at play: the upstream is directly connected to Arowana, CP and other brand channels, eliminating intermediate links to reduce costs; the middle end relies on the cold chain system of JD Logistics to efficiently reach the store; At the end, the performance is completed by its own rider network.

In this closed loop, JD.com has achieved self-operation, self-allocation, and self-sales, and established a "low-price and high-quality" user mentality while ensuring quality and efficiency.

The scale effect brought about by the reuse of the supply chain allows Seven Fresh Kitchen to feed back the surrounding formats while quickly starting volume. According to the financial report data, the number of orders from Qixian Kitchen continued to grow, directly driving the order volume of high-quality restaurants within the surrounding three kilometers to increase by more than 12%, forming a virtuous ecological cycle.

If Qixian Kitchen is the horizontal reuse of supply chain resources, JD.com's automobile business has achieved vertical penetration of supply chain capabilities and leveraged the industry's voice with the supply chain.

JD.com has not built cars personally, but it can deeply participate in the whole process of services from marketing, trading, licensing, insurance to after-sales with channel capabilities, user insights and supply chain resources.

For new energy vehicle companies, long R&D cycles, high channel costs, and difficulty in reaching users are common pain points. Relying on the nearly 700 million user consumption data accumulated by the platform, JD.com accurately captures the "cost-effective transportation" demand of the sinking market, sets production according to demand, and promotes customized development of car companies.

For car companies, JD.com not only brings traffic and brand endorsement, but also significantly reduces channel and fulfillment costs through supply chain integration. This also makes JD.com, which "does not build cars", an important part of the value chain of the automotive industry.

From takeaway to automobiles, supply chain capabilities are the confidence of JD.com to attack everywhere.

C

The new business has opened up new growth space for JD.com. In the third quarter, JD.com's new business revenue soared 214% year-on-year to 15.59 billion yuan, an increase of 12.6% from the second quarter, showing an accelerated growth trend.

In addition to revenue growth, new businesses have rapidly built a "bridgehead" in their respective tracks. In the field of instant retail, JD.com has settled in more than 2 million high-quality restaurants, and in the past Double 11, the average daily order volume of the TOP300 catering brands it cooperated with surged 13 times compared with the first month of launch.

The wine and tourism business also ushered in an explosion during Double 11, with hotel orders increasing by nearly 8 times year-on-year and air ticket orders increasing by more than 6 times year-on-year.

However, high growth is inevitably accompanied by high investment, which is also a balance problem that JD.com must face. In the third quarter, marketing expenses increased by 110.5% year-on-year to 21.1 billion yuan, mainly for new business promotion. Obviously, it takes real money to open up the blue ocean, and behind the enthusiastic response of the market is the high cost of customer acquisition and cultivation.

JD.com is clearly aware of this. A positive sign is that JD.com's takeaway has narrowed month-on-month investment in the third quarter, mainly due to the improvement in its average profit and loss performance.

This means that while JD.com is pursuing scale expansion, it is also optimizing its financial model and exploring sustainable profit paths.

In the blue ocean, the boundaries of user needs extend infinitely, and new scenarios are constantly emerging, but the resources of enterprises are always limited. JD.com must establish a screening mechanism in "attacking everywhere", which can grow into a pillar business that can go hand in hand with core retail? Which are just strategic tests? And make a choice.

This is also a normal phenomenon in the "emergence of scenarios", and for large companies, the trial and error cost of new business is included in the strategic layout. The advantage of large companies is that the decision-making efficiency of closing non-core businesses is as efficient as developing new businesses, which is not only the inevitability of survival of the fittest in the market, but also the need for optimal allocation of resources.

From a strategic point of view, even if some new businesses are adjusted in the future due to commercial returns falling short of expectations, the accumulated user minds and capabilities still have long-term value.

JD.com's "quality takeaway" mentality established through the "Seven Fresh Kitchens" and the voice generated in the automotive field have injected new connotations into the brand and strengthened JD.com's ability to multi-line narrative.

More importantly, the value of new business as a living water and user entrance has been revealed, and the number of JD.com's annual active users exceeded 700 million in October, a record high.

This means that every time a new scenario is reached, it is an expansion and reinforcement of the user pool, and the lifetime user value it brings may be much greater than the short-term financial contribution of a single business.

Embracing the new scenario has brought a valuable new narrative of user activity and growth to JD.com.