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In its four years of operation, JD found that drone delivery in
China made sense only in rural settings. Flying in busy urban envi-
ronments was too difficult for existing drone technology, although
that could change in the future. For now, densely populated cities
generate sufficient orders over a small area for those deliveries to
be combined into daily, or even more frequent, deliveries by van.
Combining sparser rural orders in the same way would result in
multiday or even weeklong delivery times. For example, a round
trip between JD’s central warehouse and a nearby rural village
usually takes about an hour for a delivery person using a three-
wheeled bike. But it takes a delivery drone only six minutes to
make the same trip. In one extreme case, a courier has to climb
up and down a mountain for four hours to deliver a package to a
village on the edge of a cliff. A drone can do the trip in minutes.
Typically, in JD’s system, once the drone’s cargo hits the
ground, its contents pass over to the “drone postman” for deliv-
ery to customers. Sometimes this is a local JD promoter—there
are about three hundred thousand across the country chosen for
their familiarity with the residents and the layout of their villages—
whose primary job is teaching villagers how to use the company’s
shopping app. Or it is a person hired on Dada, a Chinese website
that matches workers with employers.
Expanding Operations
Already the dominant retailer in China, JD expanded its
e-commerce operations to Indonesia in 2016, where it quickly
grew to offer more than 1 million different products while serving
a growing base of more than 20 million consumers. Such a mas-
sive sales operation required development of a complicated logis-
tics network consisting of ten warehouses covering 483 cities and
sixty-five hundred counties. Complicating matters was the fact that
Indonesia, with the fourth-largest population in the world, compris-
es more than seventeen thousand islands. This made it difficult for
last-mile logistics companies to deliver by road, since not all the
islands are connected by bridges. JD saw drone delivery as the
