JD Logistics Touts World’s Largest Smart Shed Outside Shanghai

JD.com on Wednesday launched the second phase of its logistics arm’s massive warehouse complex west of Shanghai, bringing the total floor area to more than 500,000 square metres (5.4 million square feet).

Equipped with integrated warehousing and sorting capabilities, Kunshan Asia No.1 Intelligent Logistics Park in Jiangsu province now stands as the world’s largest intelligent logistics park, the Chinese e-commerce giant said in a release.

At the heart of the park is an automatic sorting centre with more than 80 sorting lines and a fleet of 10,000 sorting robots, via which JD claims a sorting accuracy rate of 99.99 percent.

“During peak seasons such as JD’s 618 Grand Promotion, China’s largest mid-year shopping festival, the sorting centre operates around the clock, processing over 4.5 million parcels per day,” said the company led by chairman Richard Liu.

Eastern China and Beyond

According to JD, the launch of the latest phase of the logistics park means that over 93 percent of retail orders from eastern China — spanning Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai and Anhui — can be delivered same-day or next-day, covering a population of 200 million people.

JD set up its first Asia No.1 Intelligent Logistics Park in Shanghai in 2014 and has since established numerous Asia No.1 logistics hubs across China, forming what it calls Asia’s most extensive group of intelligent warehousing facilities.

Beyond China, JD in February launched its third warehouse in California, increasing the company’s footprint in the Golden State to more than 1.3 million square feet of warehousing space. Trucks deliver goods to the new warehouse, where they are offloaded onto a network of automated conveyors and scanned, sorted and stored by fast-moving, autonomous robots, Robotics 24/7 reported.

“As more and more retailers are shifting from brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce platforms, retailers continue to sell their products on multiple e-commerce platforms, which requires utilising multiple warehouses to handle B2B and B2C orders, dramatically increasing their holding costs,” Gordon Lu, general manager of JD Logistics United States, told the website. “This is a challenge JD Logistics is uniquely equipped to solve.”

Hong Kong IPOs Planned

In March, JD announced that Jingdong Property, a unit that develops and manages logistics and business parks, would be spun off in a Hong Kong initial public offering. As of last December, the platform had assets under management of RMB 93.7 billion ($13.7 billion) and a total gross floor area of 23.3 million square metres.

Jingdong Industrials, an asset-light provider of industrial supply chain technology and services and a partner of the JD Logistics fulfilment network, is also looking to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange via a separate IPO.

Focused on procurement of goods used in maintenance, repair and operations at manufacturers and distributors, Jingdong Industrials had a sector-leading gross merchandise value of RMB 22.3 billion ($3.1 billion) in 2022, according to a filing.