Chinese online retailing in three graphs

Chinese online retailing has grown rapidly during the 2000s. That growth has given rise to some very big retailers/marketplaces. Alibaba and JD.com are the original online retailing giants. They have seen competition arising with new kinds of players. Of the new breed of competition, Pinduoduo has received a lot of attention during the last years.

The three companies each have their differences, which are highlighted by these three charts.

Revenue

As the only “traditional” retailer of the three giants, JD.com has for long had the biggest revenues. Despite being significantly bigger than JD, Alibaba is trailing JD in terms of revenues. However, when looking at the absolute size of the platform, Alibaba is revealed as the unchallenged king of Chinese online retailing.

GMV

Alibaba is by far the biggest online marketplace in the world with 8 500 billion Yuan (1 300 billion €). This is more than double the size of Amazon Marketplace GMV that is reported to be $600 billion. Interestingly, the fast growing Pinduoduo is gaining on JD.com and has already 75% of JD’s GMV.

Users

Pinduoduo has been one of the earliest adopters of many of the features of modern Chinese online retailing. These features include live shopping, social shopping…. The embeddedness of the WeChat platform and the social elements in the Pinduoduo platform has propelled the company to a very rapid user growth. In only five years Pinduoduo has been able to reach Alibaba in the number of active users. Pinduoduo even went on to briefly surpass Alibaba during the early 2021.

Growth slowing down

All of the graphs point to the same conclusion: growth of online retailing seems to slowing down in China. Revenue growth for Alibaba and JD have dropped to near all time lows with around 10% growth Year on Year. Even the high flying Pinduoduo has seen growth numbers plummet to 5%.

Also the amount of active customers has stabilised for both Alibaba and Pinduoduo.