JD.Com's Revenue Growth Beats Expectations

BEIJING, China — JD.com, China's second biggest e-commerce company behind Alibaba, has reported better than expected revenue growth in the last three months of 2015 as volume sales on its platforms jumped despite China's economic slowdown.

The company, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's main rival in online shopping, said on Tuesday fourth-quarter revenue rose 57 percent to 54.6 billion yuan ($8.34 billion), ahead of the average market forecast of 51.794 billion yuan, according to a Thomson Reuters poll of 13 analysts.

However, JD.com's net losses ballooned to 7.6 billion yuan ($1.16 billion) in the last quarter, more than 16 times as much as a year earlier, which it blamed on impairment charges on its Paipai.com business. Excluding one-off and extraordinary items net losses were 656.2 million yuan.

China's economy has been growing at its slowest rate in a quarter of a century, although consumer buying is still relatively healthy.

The total value of merchandise transactions on JD.com's platforms was up 69 percent at 145.3 billion yuan ($22.19 billion) in the quarter.

By Paul Carsten; editors: Stephen Coates and Greg Mahlich.