Backgammon: Tencent and JD.com become shareholders to jointly develop smart retail

China Securities Network News (Reporter Ouyang Chunxiang) BBK (002251) announced on the evening of February 23 that the company signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Tencent and JD.com on smart retail, and transferred 6% shares to Tencent and 5% shares of the company to JD Bangneng. The total transfer price is 1.6 billion yuan. Neither Tencent nor JD.com rule out the possibility of continuing to increase their holdings in the next 12 months. The company's shares resume trading on the 26th.

At the same time, BBK signed a "Strategic Cooperation Framework Agreement" with Tencent and JD.com. With the vision of jointly developing "smart retail" and "borderless retail", the three parties will carry out in-depth cooperation in areas such as building new capabilities, building a "digital" operating system, and ultimately creating a new ecology to reshape the value chain of the retail industry.

Among them, in terms of exploring new value chains of "smart retail" and "unbounded retail": the three parties will explore the improvement of industrial value and the reshaping of the value chain in the retail industry. The three parties jointly take "decentralization" as the concept, are driven by technological innovation, and use data products, Internet tools, and supply chain capabilities as enabling means to promote the traditional model with the operating difference between sales and purchase as the core, and provide business customers with the full life cycle new model transformation.

In addition, regarding the empowerment of online traffic, the announcement shows that "decentralization" is the operating concept to achieve diversified operations of BBK's online traffic. BBK uses mini programs and official accounts as carrying tools to establish a WeChat shopping mall. As BBK's main online self-operated e-commerce platform, it fully leverages Tencent's social traffic and scene advantages. At the same time, JD Daojia will be used as the main e-commerce platform to give full play to JD’s advantages in online operations, logistics fulfillment, and product digitization capabilities.

In terms of offline business formats, the three parties jointly explore the application of image recognition, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies in offline business formats. Through application scenarios such as QR code shopping, in-store navigation, smart cashiers, store SaaS systems, smart supply chains, and unmanned store technology, we continue to improve store user experience and achieve significant improvements in operational efficiency.

The company stated that the signing of a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Tencent and JD.com will help realize the complementary advantages of the three parties, further enhance the company's core competitiveness, and provide a strong guarantee for the company's sustained, rapid and stable development.

Recently, Tencent has joined hands with JD.com to expand into the retail industry on a large scale: at the end of 2017, Tencent and JD.com subscribed to Vipshop’s newly issued Class A ordinary shares, with subscription amounts of US$604 million and US$259 million respectively; on January 29, 2018 , Wanda Group announced that Tencent, JD.com, Suning and Sunac will invest 34 billion yuan in Wanda Commercial.