JD.com’s Daojia to merge with Dada
Chinese internet retailer JD.com has agreed to merge its O2O business, JD Daojia, with Dada Nexus, China’s largest crowdsourcing delivery platform. When the deal is closed, the newly formed company will continue to operate its crowdsourcing delivery platform under the Dada brand.
In a statement issued on Friday (15 April), JD.com said: “By leveraging the combined extensive crowdsourcing network of Dada and JD Daojia, the new company will provide low-cost delivery services to China’s retailers, service providers and O2O enterprises, with increased efficiencies.
“The O2O supermarket platform will continue using the JD Daojia brand, leverage the expanded delivery network and focus on the location-based mobile commerce sector, cooperating with offline supermarkets, convenience stores and other local businesses to provide consumers the fastest premium shopping experience.”
JD.com will receive around 47.4% of the new company’s equity in exchange for the JD Daojia business, “various resource support” and $200m in cash.
Philip Kuai, CEO of Dada, and Zhijun Wang, President of JD Daojia, will serve as CEO and President of the new company, respectively.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016.
Launched in June 2014, Dada’s network currently covers 37 key cities in China with a total of 1.3m registered crowdsourced delivery people and average daily deliveries of over 1m in peak seasons.
JD Daojia, which started in April last year, provides consumers two-hour delivery of products from local supermarkets and other partners through its location-based app.
