By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – ADRs of JD.com (NASDAQ:JD) traded 2.3% higher in Thursday’s premarket as heavy online shopping on its platform helped the company beat estimates for sales and profit in the third quarter.
Net revenue for the September quarter was RMB219 billion ($134 billion), up around 26% on the year, as the second wave of the pandemic kept people indoors in China, leading people to shop online for groceries, furniture, books and electronics.
Sales in the company's product segment, which includes online retail sales, rose 23%. Revenue from services, comprising around 15% of the total, rose over 43%.
JD.com closed September at 552 million annual active customer accounts, 25% higher from a year ago.
Adjusted profit per ADR more than halved to 49 cents as marketing expenses, higher procurement and warehousing charges and share-based compensation to staff offset the revenue growth.
The company had earlier reported strong sales at its annual Singles' Day online sales fest. The platform recorded 349.1 billion yuan worth of transactions, up around 29% from the previous year.
That compared to a more subdued performance at larger rival Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) which saw its gross merchandise volume up 8.5% to 540.3 billion yuan ($84.5 billion), the first time in history growth at China’s largest ecommerce platform slowed below 10%.