Richard Liu is the founder and CEO of JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce company that competes with Amazon in China. He is also regarded as one of the most powerful people in China’s technology industry.
Liu was born to peasant parents on October 26, 1969, in Jiangsu Province, China. His father died when he was four years old, and his mother became disabled after an accident when he was eight years old, so Richard had to work from a young age to help support their family by farming rice paddies or picking tea leaves for hours each day while living in poverty. It wasn’t until he enrolled at Beijing University where Richard Liu found himself excelling academically and discovered his entrepreneurial spirit, which led him to start his own.
Liu dropped out of Beijing University at the age of 20 to join Y.C. Wang, an entrepreneur who had started a student magazine called Economic Information Journal. Liu later found himself working for the magazine as the circulation manager where he continued to learn about business practices by attending classes on marketing, accounting, and economics at City College of New York in his spare time while Wang became increasingly busy with running his businesses, including his biggest venture Xici Media which was worth $12 million. After learning more about business management from books supplied to him by Wang’s secretary, who worked for McGraw-Hill Publishing Company in China, Liu convinced Wang to take advantage of this opportunity, which led them to become the only foreign company allowed to sell English language encyclopedias in China. While the venture didn’t turn out to be very profitable, Liu continued to learn about business practices, including importing and exporting goods overseas.
While working at Xi Media (a Chinese language encyclopedia), Liu noticed that many of his customers were ordering books online through an e-commerce website called www.1788.com, which led him to become interested in the internet. After quitting Xici Media with $200,000 worth of severance pay, he bought a seat in 1788 (which now belongs to JD) for 20 million RMB ($2 million). He began importing clothes through Jumei International Holding Limited (), a company selling luxury brands from Europe and the United States. He soon bought out Jumei and founded JD.com (originally 360buy) as an online retailer, which began with one server in his apartment where Liu’s brother worked as chief technology officer. Through growth capital from Softbank, the company is now worth $50 billion with over 400 million active customers at any given time.
Not until 2005, when Liu made a deal with eBay to sell products for them, he became publicly known and was included on the list of China’s Richest People published annually by Forbes Magazine. After seeing JD grow to be one of China’s largest e-commerce sites, Liu went on to try and expand into other ventures such as financial services, health care, and cloud computing but his business endeavors met with a few failures.
Learn more about Liu Qiangdong: http://www.joybuy.es/liu-qiangdong-jd-ceo-about