JD.com, the second-largest online seller in China announced last week that it has started experimenting with drones in the delivery of small packages to remote areas which are difficult for delivery trucks to reach. The Beijing-based company used its own bright red drones that bear its logo.
It is apparent that this move is the company's strategy to increase its revenues since the biggest retailers in China are racing each other to gain entry to the rural communities composed of almost 600 million prospective customers.
It appears that this e-commerce company has beaten its rival, Alibaba.com, China's biggest online seller, in using drones to deliver their goods to customers in outlying areas. In January, Alibaba.com announced that it will use Beijing as its gateway to approximately 400 million people in the country's northern rural regions.
The largest online retails sales volume can come from these densely-populated territories such as Jiangsu, Guangdong and Zhejiang. However, faster sales growth has come from smaller, inland areas where people have enjoyed increasing disposable income.
JD.com resorted to using drones in its package deliveries in its desire to reduce the delivery time for its rural online shoppers. The company said that its research and logistics department has worked on the drone project with the objective of overcoming the 'last mile distribution' in the underdeveloped and remote rural regions.
Josh Gartner, JD.com spokesman said that it is the company's move to do for rural China what e-commerce sellers have done in the country's urban centers. But the challenge is formidable considering the lack of infrastructure in rural areas.
"What we've discovered is that the places that are very hard to get to, they aren't far from more developed areas," said Gartner.
He also added that in several cases poor road conditions warrants the use of drones. With drones it will be easier to deliver packages to communities only 10 kilometers away from larger cities.
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