Initial take: JD.com (Eng)

JD.com, also known as Jingdong, is one of the two giant ecommerce players in China. Unlike the main competitor Alibaba, JD’s operations stem predominantly from direct sales, end-to-end supply chain management and vertical integration rather than operating a platform for third party merchants like Alibaba does with its marketplaces Tmall and Taobao. This arguably makes the business operations more complex and CAPEX demanding which in turn entails a wide moat. Through the business model’s dependency on tangible assets on a large scale, JD has built itself into a position which is very hard to replicate. For instance, JD is the only company in the world which can challenge, or even beat Amazon, in terms of supply chain efficiency, logistic technology and infrastructure at scale.