BEIJING, December 15 (TMTPost)— JD.com, Inc., dismissed recent news about layoff as China’s leading e-commerce company faces increasing competiton amid macroeconimic uncertainties.

Credit：Visual China

JD was reported to conduct personnel adjustment involving logistics, technology, retail and other businesses. While affect employees are given a severance package of N+1, namely, the severance pay amounted to one month’ pay per year of service plus two months’ monthly wage, they will not receive end-of-year bonuses. The report cited a JD employee that the proportion of job cuts varies across departments, and the adjustment could last beyond upcoming Chinese New Year, a seven-day holiday from February 1- to 17, 2024.

JD insiders later responed to the report, according to multiple Chinese news media outlets including China National Radio , the official national radio network. The people said JD does not have any similar plan and is currently hiring even though the company’s headcount has increased to 590,000 employees.

The layoff rumor came on the heels of JD's falling behind emerging domestic rivals including PDD Holdings Inc, which aroused management concern over long-term competitiveness. Financial results indicated PDD, the operator of Chinese discount shopping site Pinduoduo and its overseas sister Temu, is a big winner when consumers became more sensitive to price change amid uncertainty of economic recovery in China.

PDD sales growth outrun major domestic rivals in the quarter ended September 30. PDD posted revenue of RMB68.84 billion (US$9.43 billion) that quarter, exceeding by about 25% more than the average analysts’ estimate. The sales surged 94% from a year earlier, accelerating from the previous quarter’s 66% year-over-year (YoY) increase, and refreshed the record set in the second quarter, increasing around 32% sequentially. JD’s revenue increased 1.7% YoY, better than the analysts’ estimated RMB246.59 billion. But revenue still slowed down from the second quarter with a 7.6% YoY increase.

Weeks after the quarterly results,  JD founder iconic founder Liu Qiangdong urged the change at intranet to highlight his determination to address concerns over the company.”So many problems broke out, which certainly are all due to my poor management, and I blame myself very much. But whatever (the problems are), I will not embrace lying flat, and wish our colleagues will by no means not,” Liu Qiangdong recently commented on a post by an employee who works for JD’s operations management at the company’s private network, Chinese news media outlet LatePost reported.

The employee wrote a long post to list some of existing problems at JD including the complexity of  promotion mechanism, and proposed to plan the pace and intensity of the online platform’s any major promotion in advance, provide more support for merchants as parts of the platform’s ecology and to hold the low-price mindset and implement the strategy to the end, according to the report. The post gets to the point and the company has to make a change unless it will come to a dead end, Liu said. The founder called for staff to have more patience as it takes time for a organization that has grown into large, bloated and inefficient to change.”JD still has its foundation and I believe we can will definitely bounce out of the bottom,” said Liu.”Any person or company will go through several ups and downs before they become great.”

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