Walmart And JD.com Announce Strategic Alliance

(RTTNews) - Walmart (WMT) and JD.com (JD) said that they have formed a strategic alliance to better serve consumers across China through a combination of e-commerce and retail. The agreement between the companies includes a wide range of business initiatives, covering both online and offline retail.

As part of the agreement, Walmart will receive 144.95 million newly issued JD.com Class A ordinary shares, amounting to approximately 5 percent of total shares outstanding.

JD.com will take ownership of the Yihaodian marketplace platform assets, including the Yihaodian brand, website and app. Walmart will continue to operate the Yihaodian direct sales business and will be a seller on the Yihaodian marketplace, leveraging its global supply chain to provide customers a wide range of products. JD.com and Walmart will work together on growing the Yihaodian brand and business under its current name and market position.

Sam's Club China will open a flagship store on JD.com, vastly expanding the availability of Sam's Club's imported products across China. It will offer same- and next-day delivery through JD.com's nationwide warehousing and delivery network, which covers a population of 600 million consumers.

Walmart and JD.com will work together to leverage their supply chains to increase the product selection for customers across China, including broadening the range of imported products.

Walmart's China stores will be listed as a preferred retailer on JD.com's O2O JV Dada, China's largest crowd-sourced delivery platform, driving online traffic to Walmart stores and allowing customers to order fresh food and other items from Walmart stores for 2-hour home delivery, while significantly broadening the product selection available to Dada's customers. Walmart will continue to operate its own physical stores.