Despite China being the world's largest food delivery market, over the past decade, the Chinese food delivery sector has been trapped in a peculiar cycle of declining unit prices while persistently struggling with issues of "high commissions, poor-quality food, and rider difficulties" that have long plagued merchants, consumers, and delivery workers. Meanwhile, market participants have maintained a "duopoly" competitive landscape.

Any commercial ecosystem shares a common logic: to break the deadlock, revitalize innovation, and activate the industry's innovation engine, a disruptive force must enter the market. Over the past six months, a bright and eye-catching red logo has risen on China's food delivery landscape.

As a new player, JD.com has carved out a surprise attack path by systematically addressing industry pain points through "zero merchant commissions, quality food delivery, and rider protection," quickly breaking the "yellow and blue dominance" of the food delivery market and becoming a key variable in the instant retail sector that cannot be ignored.

On the evening of August 14, JD.com Group announced its Q2 2025 financial results, showing quarterly total revenue of 356.7 billion yuan, up 22.4% year-over-year, setting a record for the highest growth rate in nearly three years. The new business segment driven by JD Food Delivery saw revenue surge 199% year-over-year.

According to JD.com Group CEO Xu Ran, the healthy development of JD Food Delivery is reflected in steady progress in order volume growth, merchant expansion, and full-time rider recruitment. More importantly, this new business has formed effective synergies with JD Retail and other existing businesses, "successfully achieving our initial strategic objectives."

During the earnings call, JD management, including Xu Ran, emphasized when discussing food delivery and instant retail strategies that they are not pursuing short-term results. In today's highly competitive market, JD maintains a long-term approach to these strategies, aiming to build a sustainable business model for five, ten, or even twenty years.

**New Business Achieves Strategic Expectations**

JD management consistently views food delivery from the perspective of the company's long-term development. This new business will unleash JD's strategic value in supply chain innovation, and current achievements only represent the fulfillment of JD's initial strategic objectives.

The success of JD's new business must be analyzed within the broader food delivery market context. Although JD is a newcomer to food delivery, it quickly broke the duopoly between Meituan and Ele.me, allowing consumers, merchants, and riders to fully recognize its positioning as the "third pole."

JD Food Delivery delivered impressive results in Q2: covering 350 cities nationwide with over 1.5 million quality restaurant partners. Through competition based on quality and service, JD Food Delivery has built a safe, reliable, and comprehensive service network for consumers while using technology to help nearly 200 restaurant brands achieve sales exceeding one million orders and directly signing labor contracts with over 150,000 full-time riders, providing them with comprehensive social insurance and housing fund benefits.

The internal-external synergy effect is fully demonstrated in JD Food Delivery. Through optimizing consumer experience, improving merchant services, and ensuring rider management systems, JD Food Delivery quickly and steadily achieved over 25 million orders.

Faced with competitors' malicious practices of inflating order volumes for market position and launching harmful subsidies like "zero-yuan purchases," JD chose not to follow suit. Instead, it chose to burst the "beautiful bubbles" blown up by the market, maintaining an anti-involution stance and firmly rejecting unfair competition.

Simultaneously, JD Food Delivery continues to collaborate with numerous industry-leading enterprises, providing multi-scenario, high-quality corporate dining solutions covering over 15,000 key enterprises.

"Pursuing long-term value" remains JD management's unchanging stance when discussing JD's food delivery business. In Xu Ran's view, JD is serious about quality food delivery and will continue long-term, not competing for immediate gains, not focusing on short-term wins and losses, and not concerning itself with competitors' minor moves. Internally, the focus remains on building systematic capabilities and constructing sufficient momentum.

Specifically, JD Food Delivery aims to establish a comprehensive welfare guarantee mechanism for rider fulfillment, build unique and innovative supply chain support for restaurant supply, and form the positioning and recognition of "choose JD for quality food delivery" among users.

**Strategic Design Behind Food Delivery**

Since food delivery is only part of JD's new business segment, when Q2 financial results were announced, people examined JD Food Delivery's growth potential through relevant data dimensions.

Q2 financial results showed that JD Group's active users and purchase frequency both achieved over 40% year-over-year growth, with quarterly active users achieving double-digit year-over-year growth for seven consecutive quarters.

The significant growth in platform user traffic, quarterly active users, and user purchase frequency, according to Xu Ran, mainly benefits from the continued development of JD's core retail business and new businesses like food delivery.

JD management also places greater emphasis on cross-purchasing by food delivery users in categories like JD Supermarket and the continuous improvement in conversion rates. As user activity increases, JD's revenue in core business categories like electronics and daily necessities continues to accelerate. Daily necessities category revenue accelerated 16.4% year-over-year, with supermarket categories maintaining double-digit revenue growth for six consecutive quarters. Service revenue accelerated 29.1% year-over-year.

During this year's Q2 "618" mid-year promotion, due to JD's innovation in food delivery business, the market paid special attention to the synergy and integration between this new business and online retail business and offline operations.

JD lived up to expectations, with new users placing orders during the promotion increasing over 100% year-over-year, leading the industry. Total orders from JD Retail's online business, offline operations, and JD Food Delivery exceeded 2.2 billion orders.

The synergy between food delivery and retail business also allowed JD to withstand market tests in the instant retail "30-minute delivery" competition based on experience, cost, and efficiency.

When users meet consumption needs through food delivery and instant retail platforms, Xu Ran believes JD's core e-commerce foundation first provides advantages in product selection richness, quality assurance, and price benefits. Additionally, since its establishment, JD has focused on improving supply chain capabilities in "experience, cost, and efficiency." JD Express has been building competitive advantages in the instant retail track for nearly 10 years, enabling JD to efficiently and quickly fulfill services while meeting consumers' diversified needs when facing competitors' "30-minute" speed competition.

The fresh supply chain logic behind JD Food Delivery is gradually being valued by the market, also reflected in its innovative synergy with offline operations. On June 18 this year, JD's first restaurant entity infrastructure brand "7Fresh Food MALL" opened its first store in Harbin. Local consumers can both shop and eat offline and watch "100% kitchen live broadcasts" of internal stores online, with JD Food Delivery achieving cross-brand, store consumption, and fulfillment services.

Through future expansion of "7Fresh Food MALL" nationwide, JD Food Delivery will provide comprehensive services including JD's offline fresh supply chain empowerment, online digitization, and instant delivery fulfillment to merchants within.

The series of new businesses explored through JD Food Delivery's supply chain innovation model, although still in the initial stage of market investment and verification, represents JD's willingness to practice and explore a sustainable growth paradigm, step by step.

Therefore, when many focus on JD's investment in food delivery business to address market competition in the past quarter, resulting in losses for the company. Financial reports show that compared to the new business segment's operating loss of 700 million yuan in the same period last year, this year the segment's operating loss expanded to 14.8 billion yuan.

JD management does not avoid discussing the short-term impact of heavy investment in food delivery on group profits. In the long term, if it can break through the industry's chronic pain points, bring innovative models, create incremental value, and achieve win-win outcomes for merchants, riders, consumers, and the entire restaurant industry, this was JD's clear purpose from day one of entering food delivery.

**JD Food Delivery's Path to Breaking Through**

Entering the third quarter, from food delivery to instant retail markets, subsidy wars have intensified, even focusing on "autumn's first cup of milk tea," with giants creating "beautiful bubbles" around orders.

However, in these rounds of fierce battles, JD Food Delivery's presence was notably absent from the external view.

In the early stages of JD Food Delivery's market attack, many external voices discussed its coveting of Meituan and Ele.me's market share, until JD Group founder Liu Qiangdong revealed JD's core logic: model innovation based on fresh supply chain capabilities.

It's not difficult to understand Xu Ran's external statement that from day one of entering food delivery, JD knew what it wanted to do.

Since entering the third quarter, the market has increasingly recognized this "JD red" repeatedly breaking through the food delivery market.

JD began focusing on supply chain capabilities, concentrating on user experience and boosting merchant confidence. JD also decided to abandon the "landlord" model, through innovations like self-operated brand food delivery stores such as 7Fresh Kitchen, truly promoting cost reduction and efficiency improvement from the supply chain perspective, pushing the food delivery industry to further solve merchant profitability and food safety issues, supporting healthy development of the restaurant delivery industry.

Through "partnership entrepreneurship" with quality restaurants in the restaurant industry, JD attempts to leverage its advantages in fresh supply chain to forge a new path in the food delivery market that allows restaurant practitioners to see scale growth.

7Fresh Kitchen's first store achieved over 1,000 daily average orders within one week of launch, with repeat purchase rates more than double the industry average.

The new business model withstood market testing, further highlighting JD's "thick accumulation and thin development" in food delivery strategic design. What appears to be starting from zero actually stands on the supply chain moat it has built, creating deep value "beyond three-way division."

JD's miracle in the food delivery market is no accident. According to Xu Ran, JD internally has three strategic questions: first, "pain points," second, "capabilities," third, "returns."

JD Food Delivery, this "ground force," developed systematic capabilities through experience in tea and beverage delivery, extending to the entire quality restaurant field.

Over the past six months, JD Food Delivery's fulfillment service capabilities have not only been tested multiple times by the market and users, but this high-frequency business capability has also naturally extended to instant retail business. Xu Ran stated that in the long term, food delivery has very important significance for JD's instant retail and core point-to-point business.

In other words, based on supply chain capabilities and online-offline omnichannel strategic synergy, JD Food Delivery's market breakthrough is an inevitable result. What's worth anticipating is that in the instant retail track, considered the "last piece of cake" in the internet field, different from other participants' traffic wars, JD as a key variable will pull the competitive high ground back to the real capabilities and efficiency battlefield of supply chains, forcing the industry to shift from subsidy involution to healthy competition and cooperation.