Beyond Selling Medicine, JD HEALTH's New Narrative

After several years of competition for traffic in "online consultations" and "pharmaceutical e-commerce" in the internet healthcare sector, the pure online traffic dividend seems to have reached its ceiling. For industry giants, the current proposition is no longer a binary choice between online or offline, but rather how to break business boundaries and achieve a "1+1>2" effect.

In this context, JD Health is extending its reach into the offline physical examination field, attempting to build a complete closed loop of "medical + examination + diagnosis + medication."

On January 27th, JD Health publicly disclosed the development of its physical examination business, with "caution" and "restraint" becoming the keywords for this business layout.

In terms of quantity, JD Health currently has only 5 physical examination institutions, mainly distributed in Beijing and Guangdong.

According to sources, JD Health has not yet formulated an aggressive large-scale store expansion plan, with plans to open 2 new stores in Beijing's Wangjing and Asian Games Village by 2026.

"The current offline physical examination business is still in the '0 to 1' validation stage," said Wu Daling, head of JD Health's physical examination institution business, to sources. "Unlike the rapid iteration of internet businesses, offline medical entities involve site selection, decoration, equipment procurement, and qualification approval, which have long cycles and heavy investments. To truly replicate such medical institutions of several thousand square meters requires fully mature organizational capabilities, service links, and management standards."

This "slowness" in expansion corresponds to its "high" positioning. In the fiercely competitive physical examination market, JD Health has chosen to enter the mid-to-high-end market. For example, the average transaction price at JD Health's Yizhuang store in Beijing is around 1,200 yuan.

For JD Health, the physical examination business is by no means an isolated revenue segment.

Strategically, physical examinations serve the function of seamlessly connecting low-frequency offline data with high-frequency online services. Once users discover abnormalities during the examination, they can utilize JD Health's online resources to achieve a "one-stop" solution from report interpretation to follow-up consultations and medication.

This connectivity capability is not only reflected online but also extends to the physical space offline, forming a unique "physical examination + specialty" linkage model.

In JD Health's layout, the physical examination center is located alongside self-operated specialty clinics such as dentistry and medical aesthetics, even situated "upstairs and downstairs."

As the physical examination serves as a traffic entry point to identify issues, specialty clinics immediately take over the solutions. This combination of "comprehensive business formats" is becoming a key path for JD Health to enhance customer value.

According to sources, this model is also expanding into broader fields such as weight loss and traditional Chinese medicine.

However, there remains a gap to bridge between the ideal C-end closed loop and the reality of the revenue structure.

Despite having the massive C-end traffic of the JD APP, the customer structure of JD Health's physical examination business currently still exhibits traditional "To B" characteristics, with corporate procurement revenue accounting for about 80%, and a renewal rate of over 95%.

How to truly activate the users brought by the B-end, transforming physical examinations from a one-time corporate "benefit consumption" into proactive and continuous C-end medical consumption by users, remains a direction that JD Health's physical examination business must continue to tackle in the future From "selling medicine" to "opening stores," JD HEALTH attempts to build a deeper moat through a more asset-heavy model. However, whether this closed-loop logic of "medicine + testing + diagnosis + medicine" can be successfully implemented and scaled still requires dual validation from time and the market