An update on July 22 within JD.com's internal OA system indicates that Hu Wei, the former CEO of JD Logistics, has officially left the company. This departure comes just eight months after he stepped down from the top operational role in November 2025. JD.com has not yet officially responded to this change.
Looking back over the trajectory of the past half-year, Hu Wei's handover and subsequent exit have been characterized by a clear transitional nature.
After relinquishing the CEO role in November 2025, he first transitioned to a human resources-related functional position. In June 2026, he further moved into the strategic talent reserve pool, no longer overseeing specific business operations. This latest update to his OA status marks the formal departure of this veteran who served JD.com for over 14 years.
According to public records, Hu Wei joined JD.com in January 2010, initially focusing deeply on organizational structuring and regional operations. He held positions including HR Director for the JD Group's Logistics Division and General Manager for the Southwest and North China regions. Starting in April 2019, he took the helm at JD Property and also served concurrently as Chairman of China Logistics Property Holdings, accumulating extensive experience in managing heavy-asset portfolios.
In June 2023, Hu Wei formally assumed the role of CEO at JD LOGISTICS (HKG: 02618). At that time, industry observers widely viewed this move as intended to strengthen the synergy between JD Logistics's underlying infrastructure assets and its day-to-day operations.
During Hu Wei's tenure, the core business of JD Logistics maintained steady growth. Taking the Q3 2025 financial results, reported just before his departure, as an example, JD Logistics achieved quarterly revenue of 55.084 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 24.1%, with a quarterly profit of 1.964 billion yuan.
However, as the logistics industry entered a period of intense competition for market share, the requirements from JD.com's top management for the business leader shifted.
In November 2025, Wang Zhenhui, who had previously spearheaded the independent operation of JD Logistics, returned to the company and took over as CEO. Compared to Hu Wei's background in human resources and asset management, Wang Zhenhui is internally recognized as a "pioneering" executive. This leadership change was viewed externally as a strategic defensive and offensive preparation by JD Logistics to counter the more intense price and delivery-time wars initiated by rivals like SF Express and the Tongda-affiliated couriers during a specific market cycle.
Hu Wei's departure is not an isolated personnel change but rather a cross-section of JD.com's ongoing organizational adjustments at the management level. Faced with a macroeconomic environment where consumer dividend growth has peaked and competition for existing market share is intensifying, JD.com's internal organizational reforms are entering deeper waters.
Initiating reform through organizational changes has long been a belief of JD.com's founder, Richard Liu, who has stated, "If a company fails, it is absolutely not because of money issues, but because of problems with the team."
The most definitive recent actions have occurred within the retail business line.
On July 7, 2026, JD Retail officially launched a new round of in-depth organizational structure optimization. A core measure involved the complete elimination of the C4 and C5 mid-level management tiers. Managers from these two levels were uniformly reclassified under the C3 tier for coordination, and daily employee approval processes were also changed to be handled directly by C3-level managers.
Within JD.com's original job grade system, the C4 and C5 levels served as crucial middle nodes connecting upper management with specific business lines. The cancellation of these tiers signifies a significant compression of the business decision-making chain, with approvals now starting directly from the C3 level.
In addition to the streamlining of management layers, some front-end departments of JD Retail's innovation businesses were also merged into the service-side system to fully implement a company-wide full-stack development model.
Whether it was Wang Zhenhui's urgent return at the end of 2025 or the large-scale elimination of redundant management layers in the retail sector in July 2026, JD.com's current organizational logic is very clear: streamline the middle layers and shorten the decision-making chain.
Within this flattened system that pursues ultimate efficiency, the eventual departure of former executives in transitional roles is a natural outcome of organizational metabolism. For JD.com, a more direct management structure and more aggressive business leaders represent its core assets for tackling the industry's tough battles in the next phase.
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