JD.com Is Beating Amazon and Tesla to This Key Tech Milestone
JD.com (NASDAQ: JD), China's biggest direct online retailer, is set to become the first company in the world to deploy an autonomous delivery vehicle program at scale. The company says it's operating an autonomous delivery robot project in Changshu, Jiangsu province, China, and plans to have 100 autonomous delivery robots in operation in the city by year's end.
JD, which is sometimes referred to as the Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) of China, runs its own fulfillment network and third-party marketplace in China, in addition to direct online sales. But the comparison with Amazon often understates the advances the Chinese company has made in areas like fulfillment, grocery sales, and automation, where JD has been consistently ahead of Amazon.
In 2017, JD opened a fully automated warehouse in Shanghai that requires just four workers but ships 200,000 packages a day. Now, the company has raised the bar again in automation, setting up the world's first Level 4 autonomous vehicle network.
Source Fool.com
