Lagardère Travel Retail and JD.com have strengthened their joint venture alliance after partnering with China National Service Corporation (CNSC).

The cooperation with CNSC, agreed yesterday (28 February), is designed ‘to build a more convenient and reliable duty free shopping experience for customers’, JD confirmed in a statement seen by TRBusiness.

Sinopharm subsidiary CNSC enjoys exposure across duty free points of sale at airports, sea ports and downtown in China and through its surging offshore business on Hainan island.

“The cooperation will leverage all sides’ advantageous resources to strengthen CNSC’s online and offline duty free business, cross-border e-commerce and so on,” continued the statement.

“Meanwhile, it will also promote the digital intelligent transformation of the duty-free industry from the traditional business model.

JV TO ‘COMPREHENSIVELY EXPAND’

“With policies in favour of the cross-border e-commerce being introduced, more and more traditional duty-free companies are seeking digital transformations.

“Established in Hong Kong and controlled by JD, the joint venture between JD and Lagardère Travel Retail, namely JD Worldwide-Lagardere (HK) Company Limited, will comprehensively expand its duty free related business.”

This is designed to capitalise on Lagardère Travel Retail’s experience in bricks-and-mortar offline travel retailing and luxury operations, together with JD’s prowess in supply chain, infrastructure, and omni-channel activities.

As reported, e-commerce juggernaut JD and state-owned fund China Jianyin Investment (JIC) moved to acquire a minority stake (22.36%) in Lagardère Travel Retail Asia in September.

Eudes Fabre, Lagardère Travel Retail CEO for North Asia, told TRBusiness at the time that the tie-up was focused on two core objectives: growth acceleration within China and the wider region and quickening the digitalisation of the travel retail business model.

TRBusiness aims to bring you further comment in due course.