JD.com is building 4,000 apartments for its employees and will rent them out at half the market price. It took the e-commerce giant 3.1 billion yuan (US$440 million) to get the plot in Beijing, and instead of hiring someone else to do the job, the company will be its own developer.

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Building on success

The entity that bought the lot is a subsidiary called Beijing Xinyue. It was registered at the end of last year and has acquired all the licenses needed to build affordable housing. Another two subsidiaries develop and manage residential buildings and shopping malls in Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing.

JD.com makes no secret of its interest in real estate. Its annual report shows the cash flow from real estate along with what‘s traditionally considered JD.com’s core businesses – retail, logistics, and on-demand delivery. In the past six years, JD.com has spent over 2.6 billion yuan on real estate. Land purchases since 2020 amount to 14.5 billion.

JD Property, a spinoff that develops and manages industrial parks, filed for IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March. It has 7.7 million square meters of land and 93.7 billion yuan of assets under its management.

Because we need them

JD.com has been buying industrial land since as early as 2009. The purchase of a 13,000-square-meter plot in Beijing in 2010 to build what at that time would be the largest e-commerce logistics center in Asia – along with another 37,000 square meters of warehouse land in Jiangsu the year before – caused widespread suspicion of land speculation. Richard Liu Qiangdong, founder and then CEO, responded that JD.com, which had been renting warehouses all over the place, needed warehouses of its own.

JD.com now operates over 30 million square meters of warehouse space. It also owns industrial parks that host data centers, telemedicine startups, and supply chain companies – essentially, any digital economy businesses that can potentially benefit JD.com.

Beyond industrial parks, the real estate business also owns traditional commercial and residential properties. Its shopping malls often have stores where customers can touch and try out products sold on the JD.com website. The overall size of its commercial real estate assets is relatively small, however. Total square footage is only about 30,000 square meters, which is only about 0.4 percent of that of Wanda, mall developer and operator.

Tech city of the future

Still at the experimental stage are commercial-residential hybrids. In 2019, the company bought a 180,000-square-meter lot in Dongguan for 1.06 billion yuan to build a mini-city called JD Zhigu (intelligent valley). It will host companies that specialize in AI, cloud, IoT and robotics. There will be apartment towers for employees. Construction of the first phase was completed in 2021. Over 200 companies have signed up. The second phase is being planned.

CHEN Yu, a JD.com executive, said in a press conference that these JD Zhigu will bring different parts of JD.coms business empire into an enclosed ecosystem. He conceded that many large developers and tech giants are also trying to build hybrids like this. Huawei, for example, wants one next door in Shenzhen.

Tenants of JD Zhigu may benefit from the tech giants" economies of scale, Chen said, or even become suppliers. But this also means when JD.com is not doing well, they are disproportionally exposed.

JD.com went into residential real estate rather late and has only made three major land purchases for this purpose. (Companies related to founder Richard Liu have stakes in at least a dozen residential projects in Lius hometown of Suqian.) All of them – one is the Yizhuang development in Beijing; the other two are in Shanghai and Suzhou – were bought at little or no premium in land auctions. The total value of the land exceeds 17.7 billion yuan.

The Shanghai development has already gone on the market. But progress in Suzhou seems to have stalled. The residential land came in a package with another commercial plot, for which the local government has excruciating tenant requirements.