Barry Eitel
June 18, 2018•Update: June 19, 2018
By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
Google announced Monday it would invest $550 million in Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com.
The partnership would boost JD’s competiveness with its Chinese rival Alibaba. In the United States, the agreement would help Google push into an e-commerce market dominated by Amazon.
The companies said they want to set up e-commerce businesses in multiple regions spanning the globe, from southeast Asia to the U.S. to Europe.
“This partnership with Google opens up a broad range of possibilities to offer a superior retail experience to consumers throughout the world,” JD’s chief strategy officer Jianwen Liao said in a statement. “This marks an important step in the process of modernizing global retail.”
The pair of companies said they planned to pair JD’s distribution abilities and supply chain with Google’s technological prowess. The partnership also allows for JD to sell products through Google Shopping in several areas around the globe.
"We are excited to partner with JD.com and explore new solutions for retail ecosystems around the world to enable helpful, personalized and frictionless shopping experiences that give consumers the power to shop wherever and however they want,” Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said in the announcement.
Google’s web search services are actually blocked in China for not following local censorship laws. JD and Google said that Google did not plan to bring anything new to China in the near-term as part of the deal.
Shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, rose more than 2 percent amid the news and closed Monday at $1,183.58. JD.com’s U.S.-listed shares also increased about 0.4 percent to $43.76.
JD said earlier in the year that it had 300 million monthly active users. The company was originally founded in 1998, the same year as Google.
In expanding to markets like the U.S. and Europe, JD and Google would be directly competing with Amazon.
