Liu even refers to his 250,000 JD delivery workers as “my brothers”. In a letter to these employees in 2019, when Liu announced cuts to their benefits and base salaries, he tried to soften the blow by explaining how he worked as JD delivery man in the beginning, pointing out that the first vehicle bought by the company was a rickshaw used for deliveries.

JD.com’s logistics unit set to sell shares through Hong Kong IPO

In two management reshuffles at the end of last year, Wang Zhenhui, the former chief executive of JD Logistics, abruptly left the company, citing “personal reasons”, and was replaced by Liu’s protégé Yu Rui.

In the same month, Liu demoted Chen Shenqiang from chief executive of fintech unit JD Digits, now JD Technology, to chief of staff at JD.com, promoting Li Yayun, the company’s Communist Party secretary and a compliance officer with no business management experience, as new head of the unit.

“When Liu laid low from Minneapolis, the so-called ‘three heads’ moved to the forefront,” a source with knowledge of the company’s internal politics told the South China Morning Post, referring to Wang, Chen and JD Retail chief Xu Lei.

“Liu has made it very clear [by replacing Wang and Chen] that he is still in charge of the whole business,” the source added.

JD.com declined interview requests for this story.

JD.com competes with Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post, in China’s huge e-commerce sector.

A successful listing of JD Logistics would be a further personal boost for Liu who arguably reached a low point in life when a police mugshot of him dressed in orange prison garb thrust him under the global media spotlight in 2018.

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Liu, who had married Chinese online celebrity Zhang Zetian in October 2015, was released within 24 hours of his arrest in Minneapolis and eventually cleared of all criminal charges. A civil case against Liu brought by the student is ongoing.

When court documents revealed details of his alleged sexual advances towards student Liu Jingyao, who is not related, the JD.com founder’s public image as a disciplined, self-made entrepreneur was shattered. The company’s stock lost half its value over the following months and Liu saw the door slam shut to many gatherings of Chinese business elites.

Liu resigned from the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee, a prestigious honorary position that the ruling Communist Party only reserves for a few elites. Liu has also been absent from most public events ever since, including the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, the annual gathering of who’s who in China’s internet world, as well as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Liu was interviewed by Carlyle Group co-founder and TV host David Rubenstein in January 2018.

Liu skipped the ceremony for JD.com’s secondary listing in Hong Kong in last June, after he resigned as the legal person representative and general manager of the company, assigning those positions to his aide, Xu Lei. Liu still retains the titles of chairman and CEO of JD.com.

According to Chinese business registry information, Liu relinquished at least 230 titles last year from more than 200 entities, mainly subsidiaries incorporated by JD.com across China.

Analysts said that Liu has demonstrated an extraordinarily strong character to focus on his business amid the scandal and its aftermath.

Xing Kongyu, founder of Paidai.com, a website teaching users how to start e-commerce businesses, said the pressure, humiliation and pain felt by Liu would have been something “many others may not have been able to cope with”.

“All the changes at JD.com, from organisational changes to personnel reshuffles, have shown that Liu has become even stronger,” Xing said. “Liu is very clear about what his goal is in life and for JD.”

Like many Chinese tech entrepreneurs, Liu, 48, is a typical rags-to-riches story. Born to a poor family in the northern part of Jiangsu province, he has shared many stories of his hard life in the early days, including when fellow villagers gave him 76 boiled eggs and 500 yuan when he travelled to Beijing to attend university in 1992.

Analyst said Liu’s tough upbringing may have helped him retain firm control of his business empire, whose corporate name includes one character of his Chinese name, at a challenging time.

Jerric Wu, who has studied China’s Big Tech as senior project manager at Kotler Marketing Group, said Liu has retreated from his frontline roles but his control of JD.com, through equity ownership and voting rights, has not weakened.

“There’s no power struggle [within JD.com] as he is still the actual controller,” Wu said, adding that Liu is “not only a spiritual symbol but also a strong strategic commander”.

Investors have also cast their vote of confidence in Liu’s business. JD.com’s shares in the US have rebounded from a low of about US$21 at the end of 2018 to over US$100 last week. Liu remains one of the richest people in China’s technology world with a net worth of US$25 billion, according to the latest Forbes rich list data. The planned IPO of JD Logistics, after which JD.com will continue to hold over 50 per cent stake, is set to increase his wealth further.

Behind the scenes Liu has also been pushing for the initial public offering of JD Technology, which received a name change from JD Digits at the end of 2020 and was formerly known as JD Finance, but it is unclear when Chinese regulators will give the go-ahead after the scuttling of the IPO for Ant Group, the fintech unit affiliated with Alibaba.

However, JD.com appears to be in the good books of China’s central bank which approved its role as a platform for the initial trial of China’s sovereign digital currency. JD.com is also a key investor in Pudao Credit, the holder of a license to collect personal credit data, a privilege that neither Ant’s Alipay or Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay have been able to secure yet.

Within JD.com, Liu is becoming directly involved in areas he sees as having strategic importance. At the end of last year, the company announced that Liu would personally lead a newly created “community group buying unit” to compete in a market already facing stiff rivalry from the likes of on demand services giant Meituan.com, e-commerce platform Pinduoduo and ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing.

JD.com customers also stayed loyal to the company, with the number of active buyers in the 12-month period to the end of September 2020 rising to 440 million from 334 million a year earlier, according to the latest data released by the company.

JD.com is expected to earn US$3.9 billion in profits in 2020, according to a consensus forecast by Bloomberg, up from US$1.8 billion in 2019 and a loss of US$368 million in 2018. Revenue is expected to hit US$114 billion in 2020, up from US$82.9 billion in 2019 and US$71 billion in 2018.

Li Chengdong, chief executive of e-commerce consultancy Dolphin Think Tank, said JD.com has not only survived the “extremely negative” impact from Liu’s scandal in Minneapolis but has thrived.

“The Minnesota incident has long been a thing of the past. It will no longer affect JD.com,” Li said. “JD’s strategic focus is on the retail supply chain now. It is much more focused on leveraging its own advantage.”

Additional reporting by Celia Chen