JD.com
JD.com (Jingdong, 京东) is one of China’s two largest e-commerce companies.1 It is not a coffee company. It matters to this wiki because in August 2025 it walked into the Best of Panama auction — an event normally contested by roasters and green-bean importers — and bought the natural Geisha champion outright.
That purchase is the clearest single piece of evidence that China’s appetite for coffee has reached the very top of the price ladder, and that the buyer at the top is no longer necessarily someone who roasts coffee for a living.
Who JD.com is
Worth knowing before the coffee part, because the size of the company explains the size of the gesture.
Liu Qiangdong — known in English as Richard Liu — started the business on 18 June 1998 as a small electronics counter in Beijing. It sold physical goods in physical shops until 2004, when the business moved onto the web; the site traded as 360buy.com from around 2007 and took the name JD.com in 2013.2 It listed on the Nasdaq in May 2014, raising US$1.8 billion.3
Two features of the company carry over directly into how it handles coffee:
- It buys and sells the goods itself. Unlike a marketplace that merely hosts other people’s shops, JD stocks much of what it sells first-party. Buying a lot of green coffee outright at auction and then roasting and selling it under its own grocery brand is an ordinary week’s work for a first-party retailer — it would be a strange move for a pure marketplace.
- It owns its delivery. JD built an in-house logistics arm from 2007 rather than renting one, which is the usual explanation for its reputation in China for authenticity and speed. A company that already moves parcels can move roasted coffee.
The scale: revenues of about US158.8 billion** in 2024. Against that, the roughly **472,000 it paid for the Geisha lot is a rounding error — smaller than most single television advertisements.
To verify
More of this is now settled. The magneto-optical products (rewritable optical discs), the original name JD Multimedia, the Zhongguancun location and — newly — the SARS outbreak of 2003 as the reason the business went online are all confirmed by an independent source read directly: “The SARS outbreak in 2003 kept staff and clients of Jingdong at home and forced Liu to rethink the business model and divert to online business.” What remains unconfirmed is the shop count — that it had grown to about 12 stores by 2003. That figure appears in the research report only via two business-summary pages45 that carry near-identical text, so they count as one source, not two. Sources also disagree on the original company’s name (“Jingdong Century Trading”, “JD Multimedia”). A second wrinkle: JD’s own investor-relations page reportedly dates the founding of JD.com to 2004 rather than 1998 — see the callout on the Liu Qiangdong note, where that page could not be loaded to check.
There is no coffee-producing farm, estate or competition entrant named “JD.com” — a search of the specialty-coffee record turns up nothing under that name in Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, SCA or CQI listings. Every mention of JD.com in this wiki is the retailer, appearing as a buyer.
The 2025 Best of Panama purchase
JD.com bought 20 kg of sun-dried (natural) Geisha from Hacienda La Esmeralda for approximately 3.4 million yuan, or 23,608 per kilogram** — about **472,000 for the lot.6 Chinese coverage nicknamed the lot the “Geisha King.”
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Coffee | Natural (sun-dried) Geisha, Hacienda La Esmeralda |
| Score | 97.00 |
| Lot size | 20 kg — the whole lot |
| Price per kg | $23,608 |
| Total | |
| Auction | Best of Panama, August 2025 |
Converted to the per-pound figure the auction reports in, 23,608/kg is about **10,708/lb** — which matches the ”≈ $10,709/lb, buyer in China” already recorded for the 2025 natural Geisha on the Best of Panama note. Same farm, same process, same year, same price: JD.com is that buyer.
It was the second-most-expensive lot of the 2025 auction. The washed Geisha went higher — $30,204/kg to Julith Coffee of Dubai — in the year Hacienda La Esmeralda swept all three categories.
To verify
No official Best of Panama results page naming winning bidders was found; the auction’s own site7 shows only the upcoming edition, not past buyers. The JD.com attribution rests on one trade outlet plus the price match above. It is consistent and almost certainly right, but it is not confirmed by a primary source.
Why a retailer bought it
A roaster buys a record lot to sell it. JD.com bought one to be seen buying one. Three things it gets:
- A credibility claim. Buying the champion lot is the fastest way for a general retailer to be taken seriously as a coffee seller — this is Premiumisation used as an advertising budget rather than a coffee-buying one.
- Attention. The purchase produced exactly the reaction it was designed to: astonishment on Chinese social media that a bean this famous might be tasted at a normal person’s price.
- A shop-window for the rest of the store. JD says it will roast and process the beans in China and sell them exclusively through JD Supermarket, its first-party grocery arm, alongside promotions including “5,000 − 4,990” coupons and an invitation to “taste specialty coffee for 9.9 yuan” (about $1.40).
The arithmetic is worth sitting with. Twenty kilograms of green coffee loses roughly 15% of its weight in roasting, leaving enough for somewhere around a thousand cups. At $23,608 per green kilogram, the beans in a single cup cost several hundred dollars before anyone touches a grinder.
To verify
Whether the 9.9-yuan cup applies to the Geisha King itself is not clear from the source. The wording (“taste specialty coffee for 9.9 yuan”) sits next to the Geisha announcement but may describe a broader coffee promotion. The engine report treats the two as the same offer; the source does not say so outright. Do not state that JD sold record-priced Geisha for 9.9 yuan a cup until a Chinese-language primary announcement confirms it.
The wider coffee push
The auction lot was not a one-off. JD.com is building a coffee business on both sides of the screen:
- 7Fresh Coffee — an own-brand café chain launched in November 2025, named after JD’s 7Fresh supermarkets. It had one store open in Beijing and a stated plan to add three to five stores a week, aiming to cover the capital’s main districts by year-end.8 Its pitch is fresh milk only — no powdered creamer — and it expands cheaply by leasing counter-sized spaces inside supermarkets, hotels and offices.
- Local services. JD entered food delivery in February 2025 and hotels and travel in June 2025, and founder Liu Qiangdong announced a standalone delivery app plus a reviews platform, JD Dianping — positioning the company as a “one-stop lifestyle platform” against Meituan and Alibaba’s Ele.me.
Coffee sits at the junction of all of it: a product it can source globally, roast domestically, sell online, pour in its own cafés, and deliver. The Geisha purchase is the loudest possible announcement that the junction exists.
For scale: Luckin Coffee reported 33,596 stores as of 31 March 2026, a figure that appears on Luckin’s own website.9 JD is entering against the largest coffee chain in the world.
The other incumbent is Starbucks China, which reports 8,000 stores on its own corporate site.10 An earlier research brief gave that figure as “3,300+” with no source attached; it was wrong, and the company’s own number supersedes it.
Related
- Liu Qiangdong · 7Fresh Coffee · Best of Panama · Hacienda La Esmeralda · Geisha · Julith Coffee
- China coffee market · Premiumisation · Dashang Group · Cup of Excellence · Luckin Coffee · Starbucks China · Tmall
- Best of Panama results archive · Panama Cup