Liu is the founder and chairman of JD.com, an online retailer and China's largest e-commerce business by revenue. The Beijing-based company began trading on the Nasdaq in May 2014. JD.com has more than 580 million active customers and reported revenue of 1 trillion yuan ($156 billion) in 2022.
Liu's fortune is derived from his 13% stake in JD.com, an online retailer in China. JD.com has more than 580 million active customers, according to the company website.
He controls the shares through Max Smart, a British Virgin Islands-based holding company, according to the company's 2022 annual report. He also controls Fortune Rising Holdings, another investment entity based in the British Virgin Islands, which has a stake in the company. Shares held by Fortune Rising are excluded from Liu's valuation because they're held as part of a share incentive plan that conveys no personal economic benefits to Liu.
The value of his cash investments reflects proceeds from the sale of shares in JD.com's IPO and an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.
Josh Gartner, a JD.com spokesman in Beijing, declined to comment on the billionaire's net worth.
Richard Liu was born in Suqian, a city in eastern China's Jiangsu province. While studying sociology at Beijing's Renmin University, he began writing computer code in his spare time. He also established a restaurant near campus that left him in debt after the staff embezzled money from the business.
Liu's next venture involved selling magneto-optical products in Zhongguancun, Beijing's technology hub, in 1998. After the SARS epidemic depressed China's retail industry, Liu closed the stores and switched his focus to online sales with 360buy Jingdong. He built the platform into China's second largest e-commerce company by volume and changed its name to JD.com in 2014. When Liu raised $1.8 billion with a public listing on the Nasdaq in May the same year, the online retailer became the largest IPO for a Chinese Internet company traded in New York, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
JD.com's website says it has more than 200 million active users visiting its platform to shop for products that range from home appliances to books and clothes. It's also one the few companies in China with a permit to lease wireless capacity from the nation's existing carriers. Investors include Russian billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Yuri Milner, as well as Tencent Holdings, Asia's largest internet company, which bought a 15 percent stake in March 2014.
JD.com agreed to buy a stake in Vipshop with Tencent Holdings for $863 million in December 2017, according to a Bloomberg News story.