China's IPO-bound JD.com posted narrower $8 million loss in 2013

SHANGHAI, China - China's No.2 internet retailer JD.com, Inc, set for a $1.5 billion U.S. initial public offering (IPO), posted a narrower 50 million yuan ($8.07 million) loss in 2013, according to its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

JD.com, which recently teamed up with giant Chinese tech firm Tencent Holdings Ltd, is the closest rival to Alibaba Group Holdings, the leader by far in China's e-commerce market, which this month also started plans for a much larger U.S. IPO.

JD.com, which has close to 50 million active customers, saw revenues increase 67.4 percent to 69.3 billion yuan in 2013 from 41.4 billion yuan the year before. The company had posted a 1.7 billion yuan loss in 2012.

The firm hopes to leverage its tie-up with Tencent's popular messaging app WeChat to increase its share of China's e-commerce market, with the intention of becoming the "largest e-commerce company in China", it said.

The tie-up also burnishes the appeal of JD.com's planned U.S. listing while taking some shine off Alibaba's own IPO, which is expected to be worth $15 billion.

China's internet retail market is set to triple from 2012 to over $300 billion in 2018 as the country's smartphone-savvy shoppers surf the web for everything from plane tickets to sneakers, according to Euromonitor.