SHANGHAI â€" JD.com, one of China’s biggest e-commerce companies, said in a regulatory filing on Thursday that it plans to raise $1.5 billion this year in an initial public offering in the United States.
JD.com, formerly known as 360buy.com, is the second biggest e-commerce company in China and a rival to the country’s e-commerce powerhouse, the Alibaba Group, which operates the Taobao.com and Tmall.com shopping sites. JD.com’s offering is expected to be one of the biggest Chinese listings of the year in the United States.
This year, Alibaba is expected to raise multiples of that in its own listing, which is expected to value the Chinese company at about $130 billion, which would eclipse the Facebook I.P.O.
Online commerce has grown spectacularly in China over the last few years, undermining brick-and-mortar operations, fueled by easy payment options and low-cost, same-day delivery.
Far behind Alibaba and JD.com are other e-commerce upstarts, like dangdang.com and Yihaodian, which is partly owned by Walmart. United States, Japanese and Middle Eastern investors have helped Chinese investors and entrepreneurs finance the growth.
JD.com was started 10 years ago by Richard Liu, a 40-year-old entrepreneur who got his start selling electronics. Mr. Liu is now chairman and chief executive. His JD.com shopping site now has 35 million active users and reported selling $14 billion worth of goods in the first three quarters of 2013.
Still, the company is a distant second to Alibaba, whose e-commerce sites handle more transactions each day than Amazon.com and eBay combined.
But while Alibaba’s sites â€" Taobao and Tmall â€" act as an e-commerce platform, connecting buyers, sellers and third parties, JD.com is operating as a business-to-consumer player, more closely mirroring Amazon. The Chinese company has 82 warehouses in 34 Chinese cities.
Over the last several years, though, JD.com has lost billions of dollars on marketing and financing its build-out. Among its investors are Digital Sky Technologies and Yuri Milner, the Russian investor who took an early stake in Facebook, and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, as well as Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital.
In 2010, the company said that Walmart had joined with several other investors to make a $500 million investment in the company. Walmart later said it did not make the investment and instead took a large stake in a Chinese rival, Yihaodian.
In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, JD.com said it planned to list American Depositary Receipts but did not identify which United States exchange it plans to list them on. The company’s underwriters are Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS.
