BEIJING — Just about every June, on the anniversary of his company’s founding, Richard Liu dons a big motorcycle helmet and red uniform, hops on a three-wheeled electric bike and makes home deliveries for his e-commerce company JD.com.
It is in part a publicity stunt for Mr. Liu, the 41-year-old billionaire who is the company’s chairman and chief executive. But it is also a way to better understand the technical and logistical challenges facing JD, which is in a pitched battle for e-commerce supremacy in the world’s second-biggest economy after the United States.
Long overshadowed by its rival Alibaba, JD has emerged as China’s other online goliath by carving out its own distinct identity.
While Alibaba’s marketplace serves as a platform to connect buyers and sellers, JD buys goods from manufacturers and distributors and holds the inventory in its own warehouses, in a model that echoes Amazon’s. It then arranges for quick delivery of virtually everything from television sets and refrigerators to socks and T-shirts, using motorbikes that weave in and out of traffic in some of the country’s biggest cities.
The e-commerce company has seized investor and public interest to an extent that is unusual for a company that does much of its business in China.
Like Amazon, JD has invested heavily in infrastructure, pumping more than $1.5 billion into building and leasing warehouses and order-fulfillment centers around China. But JD has gone even further, venturing into home delivery with its own fleet of trucks and more than 20,000 couriers, all in the hope of capturing what is projected to be a $1 trillion Chinese e-commerce market by 2020.
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Around the same time, he also struck a deal with China’s social media and mobile gaming giant Tencent, which allows JD to tap into Tencent’s huge user base. Tencent now owns about 20 percent of JD.
Mr. Liu is also pushing JD into online groceries and finance, and lending to his vendors the way Alibaba does. But unlike Alibaba and Amazon, he says he has little interest in developing film or entertainment divisions.
“We don’t want to produce films or TV shows, but finance, yes,” Mr. Liu said, before returning to his thoughts on infrastructure. “And every few years we’ll invest in new warehouses. We need some temperature-controlled warehouses.”
Phoebe Peng contributed research from Shanghai.
A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: China’s Other E-Commerce Giant Follows Its Own Path. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
