Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the JD Health International Incorporated 2024 interim results conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. Please note that this English simultaneous translation line will be in listen-only mode for the duration of the call, including the Q&A session. If you wish to listen to the management's original statement or ask a question during the Q&A session, you will need to be dialed in to the Chinese language line. I'll now turn the call over to Ms. Du Binglin, Head of Investor Relations at JD Health. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator. Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our 2024 interim results conference call. Joining us today are JD Health's Executive Director and CEO, Mr. Jin Enlin, and CFO, Ms. Deng Hui
Before we start, we would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from those mentioned in today's announcement and this discussion. The company does not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information, except as required by law. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-IFRS financial measures for comparison purposes only. For a definition of non-IFRS financial measures and a reconciliation of IFRS to non-IFRS financial results, please refer to the interim results announcement for the six months ended June 30, 2024, issued yesterday. For today's call, management will read the prepared remarks in Chinese and will only be accepting questions in Chinese during the Q&A session.
A third-party interpreter will provide simultaneous interpretation in English on a separate line for the duration of the call. Please note that English translation is for convenience purposes only. In the case of any discrepancy, management's statements in their original language will prevail. I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Jin Enlin. Please go ahead, sir.
Hello, everyone. I'm Jin Enlin, CEO of JD Health. It's a pleasure to share our 2024 first half results. From a policy perspective, national and local authorities continued to guide the industry's high-quality development in the first half of the year. Notably, the key tasks for deepening medical and health system reform in 2024, issued by the State Council, highlighted the digital empowerment of the application of medical and healthcare reforms.
In addition, the Hainan Health Commission released a policy expressly encouraging online hospitals to standardize the use of artificial intelligence technology and digital therapies. These favorable policies provide a guarantee for the stable development of the industry. From the demand perspective, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the average per capita medical and healthcare consumption expenditure in China was RMB 2,460 in 2023, up 16% year-over-year, mainly attributable to the increasing health awareness among residents and the more diverse choices of health consumption. Meanwhile, data also illustrated that China's total number of people aged 65 years old and above has increased from 88 million by the end of 2000 to 217 million by the end of 2023, with an annual growth rate of 3.99%.
This large and rapidly growing elderly population indicates the significant demand for healthcare services. Furthermore, users are increasingly willing to look for more professional healthcare information and services online. A report issued by the China Internet Network Information Center points out that convenient access to professional information, such as medical and health data, has become the primary factor in promoting non-internet users' access to the internet. The report also shows that as of December 20, 2023, the online healthcare user base in China has grown significantly. In such a context, JD Health has continued to enhance its integrated online and offline service system to amplify its value proposition as the first entry point for online health consumption, creating greater value for shareholders and society while realizing its own high-quality development.
Now, I'd like to share our business updates for the first half of the year, followed by a discussion of our business outlook for the second half. Let me first walk you through what we achieved in the first half of the year across four primary areas. First, continually solidify our position as the first entry point for online health, health consumption. Pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chain capability has been the cornerstone of JD Health's business development. In this regard, we've established a combined business model of direct sales plus online marketplace, plus on-demand retail. We expanded more service scenarios as well as broadened our user reach that created new growth opportunities for our brand partners by leveraging our unique competitiveness in the omni-channel network. Here, let me give you an example.
In June this year, our offline DTP Pharmacy filled the first domestic order of Leqembi, a targeted drug for Alzheimer's disease, fully demonstrating the value of our omni-channel supply chain capabilities in the inclusivity and accessibility of pharmaceuticals. Let me give you another example. In May this year, we took the lead in launching the medical insurance payment for online purchases in Beijing, making us the platform featuring the largest number of member stores, the broadest user coverage, and the fastest O2O service provider in Beijing, and becoming the first entry to the medical insurance payments for online purchases in the city. Recently, we quickly and successfully replicated this business model in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other cities, so that more and more people can enjoy the convenience of online medical insurance payments. Second, continuously enhance healthcare service capabilities centered on user experience.
We've never stopped exploring innovative online medical service models. So far this year, we've continued to make breakthroughs in specialty care services. Notably, our online dermatology care center has served more than 15 million patients since inception, with a cross-departmental consultation rate of over 20%. In terms of psychological health, we are also building the first domestic large language model-driven online psychological health service center in Beijing, with the launch of Small Universe for chatting and healing, our AI therapist. All these small but significant milestones further validated the value and development potential of online specialty care services. Meanwhile, we continued to enhance our integrated online and offline service capabilities. We took the lead in launching our at-home testing service, specifically for patients with common respiratory viruses and pathogen infections, which also promoted the introduction of JD at-home rapid testing.
Moreover, we also embedded examination and testing services into online consultations this year, marking the real comprehensive service closed loop of medical plus testing, plus pharmaceuticals through online consultation, testing service, and online purchases. This also demonstrated the huge expansion and enhancement in online medical service scope and functions. Third, accelerate the application of technological innovation, with a focus on the launch of large language models. In fact, we all know that in the future, we need to leverage technological innovation to truly achieve the inclusivity and accessibility of healthcare services. In the first half of the year, with our healthcare LLM, Jingyi Qianxun, as our cornerstone, we focused on three key aspects: providing accessible, convenient, and reliable services. We explored the application for a wider range of users, catering to their health management needs and delving deeper into specialized disease areas.
Not long ago, we launched Kangkang, an intelligent health assistant product for the public, that can not only answer users' health questions at any time, but also accurately and efficiently connect users to medical service resources. We hope this product could become a smart doctor for users. For doctors and specialists, we're also developing an intelligent expert service application based on Jingyi Qianxun, freeing them from daily, repetitive, low-value, process-oriented work, so that they can focus more on important work. Meanwhile, in the hospital scenario, we also provided smart solutions to intelligent service process upgrades, reshaping the patient's consultation process. Fourth, proactively fulfill corporate social responsibility. This year, we've continued to invest in three public welfare areas: elder care, children's health, and care for rare disease patients.
For example, we launched a senior healthcare channel, and in collaboration with our partners, initiated the Sit and bathe public welfare project. We also joined forces with public welfare organizations to launch the Children's Psychological Health Program, providing psychological health support for left-behind migrant and orphan children. Next, an overview of our strategic priorities for the second half of the year. Overall, we'll continue to strengthen the retail pharmacy plus healthcare services ecosystem, while advancing tech-driven innovation to further promote inclusive healthcare services. In terms of the retail pharmacy business, we'll consistently strengthen business synergies among our direct sales, online marketplace, and omni-channel initiatives. Our focus will be on maintaining long-term price competitiveness, continuously improving user experience, and further enriching the platform ecosystem to achieve high-quality growth with upstream and downstream partners.
In terms of medical and healthcare services, we'll strive to further improve the integrated online and offline service system and strengthen the closed loop capability of medical plus testing, plus pharmaceuticals. In addition, we'll also collaborate with more medical and healthcare institutions, as well as doctors, nutritionists, and pharmacists, aiming to continually strengthen our service capabilities and expand the supply of high-quality healthcare services. In terms of technological innovation, we optimize digital and intelligent solutions by leveraging our healthcare LLM, Jing Yi Tianxun, facilitating more application launches and effectively delivering value in more healthcare scenarios. Looking ahead, JD Health will remain committed to its business philosophy of trust-based value creation centered on customers' health.
Through close collaboration with upstream and downstream partners, we'll continue to open up our supply chain infrastructure and healthcare service capabilities to achieve sustainable development together with customers, industry stakeholders, partners, and society as a whole. Thank you. I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Miss Deng Hui, to discuss the details of our financial performance.
Thank you, Ms. Du . Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining JD Health's earnings conference call. It's my pleasure to provide an update on our performance in the first half of 2024. In the first half of 2024, the internet plus healthcare industry advanced in line with regulations, delivering greater value to society. Online pharmacy and medical consultations have been integrated into people's daily lives, with users' stronger willingness to actively seek healthcare products and services online.
As a leading player in this new era of healthcare services, JD Health actively responds to policy directives. We leverage technology to accelerate service model innovation, enhancing our integrated online and offline service systems. We are committed to providing high quality, accessible, and affordable healthcare services to a broad range of users.... JD Health maintained high quality growth in the first half of 2024, with revenue of 28.3 billion RMB, up 4.6% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of the high base in the first quarter due to the pandemic, revenue in the second quarter increased by 14.6% year-over-year. We continue to strengthen our retail business model, encompassing direct sales, online marketplaces, and on-demand retail, further enriching our product offerings while maintaining competitive pricing by leveraging our supply chain capabilities.
During the reporting period, we expanded our cooperation with industry-leading pharmaceutical companies and health product suppliers, consistently elevating consumers' awareness and brand recognition. Focusing on user experience, we launched a number of services to enhance user experience and continue to earn users' trust. As of June 30, 2024, our annual active user accounts for the past 12 months reached 180 million, a net addition of approximately 12 million compared to June 30, 2023. Our direct sales revenue for the first half of 2024 recorded a year-over-year growth of 3.2%, reaching 23.9 billion RMB, constituting 84.4% of the total revenue. In terms of pharmaceuticals, we continue to strengthen our brand partnership with a number of global pharmaceutical companies and comprehensively developed more in-depth cooperation.
In the first half of 2024, a number of new and specialized drugs debuted on the JD Health platform. In addition, we sold the first domestic order of Leqembi, a targeted drug for Alzheimer's disease treatment, in June, demonstrating JD Health's leading omni-channel supply chain capabilities in the pharmaceutical field. After the high base impact of the pandemic, pharmaceuticals, as our core category, still maintain its competitive advantages. In the future, we'll further empower our partners' brands through omni-channel expansion and digital marketing. In terms of medical services developed by our consumer insights and supply chain capabilities, we launched a senior healthcare channel, providing users with quality healthcare products covering more than 30,000 brands across thousands of related subcategories, catering to their diverse needs. In terms of healthcare products, we continue to upgrade an array of customer services.
Notably, for this year's June 18 World Grand Promotion, we also upgraded our nutritionist consultation service to provide users with professional and personalized nutritional consultation and suggestions on dosage, precautions, and related medical knowledge. At present, we have built China's largest online service platform and attracted nearly 1,000 dieticians and nutritionists, enabling us to offer timely responses to customer inquiries with an average response time of 30 seconds. These services have received up to a 98% positive user satisfaction rating. In the first half of 2024, our service revenue reached 4.4 billion RMB, marking a 12.5% increase compared to the previous year, accounting for 15.6% of total revenue. This proportion has further grown 1.1% compared to the same period of 2023, with high growth rates sustained in platform commissions, advertising revenue, and related services.
We continue to help merchants jointly improve their operation efficiency and digital marketing capabilities to achieve high quality growth. As of June 30, 2024, we doubled the number of third-party merchants to over 80,000. In the first half of 2024, we further developed our on-demand retail business. While advancing the merchant ecosystem and improving the efficiency of self-operated pharmacies, we upgraded the instant delivery service standard to as fast as 90 minutes with a 28-minute average delivery time. As of June 30, 2024, we had partnered with over 150,000 pharmacies nationwide to provide 24-hour on-demand services across more than 490 cities.
We also responded proactively to public demand and policy guidance by enabling medical insurance payments for online purchases in Beijing, Shanghai, and Dongguan, with our launch of the medical insurance payment pilot project in Beijing in May this year. As of June 30, 2024, over 350 medical insurance-designated retail pharmacies had joined the JD platform, and the service network had extended to cover all administrative districts in Beijing. This expansion made JD Health the medical service platform featuring the largest number of member stores, the broadest user coverage, and the fastest O2O service provider in Beijing.... In terms of healthcare services, we continued to accelerate the innovative application of healthcare large language models and other technologies across its medical and healthcare services, further improving quality and efficiency of online consultations.
Furthermore, we enhanced our specialty care service capabilities and our at-home service experience to cater to our users' diverse healthcare needs. As of June 30, 2024, JD Health Online Hospital had seen an average daily volume of over 480,000 online consultations. Notably, we've successfully built a closed loop business model of medical plus pharmaceuticals for our dermatology care center, with the establishment of 4 departments and 49 expert clinics, serving over 15 million patients since inception, with a cross-departmental consultation rate of over 20%. At the end of 2023, we took the lead in launching our at-home testing service, specifically for patients with common respiratory viruses and pathogen infections, which is now available in 5 cities across China.
In the first half of the year, we continued to expand our at-home testing service portfolio and optimize the service process, creating a convenient one-stop at-home healthcare service experience for users by integrating more healthcare scenarios, including online consultations and purchases of pharmaceuticals and healthcare products. Going forward, JD Health will strive to further expand its home-based service scenarios and service offerings, including at-home nursing and specialized care services. Our gross profit margin in the first half of the year increased 70 basis points year-over-year to 23.6%, demonstrating our efforts in deepening our supply chain network and our professional procurement and selling capabilities to attract more merchant investments.
Looking ahead, we'll partner with more merchants on the platform to offer our users more competitive pricing and servicing, bringing users a more cost-effective product experience, and thereby continuously enhancing consumers' trust and brand recognition to further generate market share in various categories. On a non-IFRS basis, our fulfillment expense ratio in the first half of the year was 10.2%, an increase of 90 basis points from the same period of 2023, owing primarily to our decreasing average price per order as a result of continued investment in user experience. In the first half of 2024, our selling and marketing expense ratio was 4.9%, increasing by CNY 214 million compared to the same period of 2023. We made significant strides with our JD Pharmacy brand's promotional strategy, successfully strengthening our brand recognition and influence among consumers.
We will further emphasize scenario-based marketing and invest in more diverse marketing channels to enhance the reach and conversion of new users. We also pay close attention to the ROI of our marketing investments. In the first half of 2024, our R&D expense ratio was 2.2%, flat with the same period of 2023. As of the end of June, we had a total of 557 R&D personnel, slightly higher than the same period of 2023. Our R&D per-personnel efficiency has further improved with the ongoing optimization of middleware infrastructure. In addition, owing to the fast growth of our business, we had a higher utilization efficiency of fixed R&D expenses, such as servers, which lowered the R&D expense ratio, including the remuneration of R&D personnel.
In the short to medium term, we expect to accelerate the unleashing of the value of healthcare data through our plan to acquire more talents in data and AI to secure our leading position in digital and intelligent operations, healthcare big data applications, and pan-health innovative initiatives. In addition, we'll further invest and optimize in Jingyi Qianxun LLM to accelerate the applications in healthcare scenarios, consistently creating new engines and quality driving forces for the healthcare industry. Our G&A expense ratio was 0.8% in the first half of 2024. Our back-end staff and operational management efficiency levels continued to lead the industry. Finance income increased to RMB 1 billion in the first half of 2024, up 5.7% year-over-year, mainly attributable to the increase in cash reserves.
Other net income and gains in the first half of 2024 were approximately CNY 460 million, primarily consisting of returns from wealth management products and government grants. Excluding the share incentives, non-IFRS net profit in the first half of 2024 increased by 8.5% year-over-year to CNY 2.64 billion, with a margin of 9.3%, rising 30 basis points year-over-year, reaching the record high for the first half of the year since listing. Our cash flow from operating activities reached CNY 2.23 billion in the first half of 2024.
As of the end of June, the combined amount of cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash, long-term and short-term deposits, and wealth management products at fair value through profit or loss and at amortized costs, was 56.4 billion RMB, a net increase of 2.7 billion RMB compared with December 31, 2023. To sum up, in the first half of 2024, JD Health maintained high quality growth across its entire business. With steady improvement in operating efficiency and profitability, our active, high quality user base, thriving and healthy platform ecosystem, along with robust cash flows, reflect the advantages of our dual engine, closed loop business model. Before we wrap up, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to our shareholders for their enduring support and trust in JD Health.
Looking ahead, we'll remain steadfast in adhering to our business philosophy of trust-based value creation, centered on customers' health and focused on cost, efficiency, and experience, further improving our supply chain capabilities and price competitiveness, and better satisfying our customers' evolving healthcare demands. We also strive to deepen our cooperation with upstream and downstream partners to jointly promote high quality development across the industry. Meanwhile, we'll continue to advance our business comprehensively, promoting steady growth and profitability, and thereby creating greater value for our shareholders. That concludes our prepared remarks. We are now open for questions.
Thank you, Ms. Deng Hui. This concludes our prepared remarks. We would like now to open the call to your questions. We're now in the Q&A session. To ask a question, please dial into the Chinese line and then press star one on your telephone's touchtone keypad.
During time constraints, please limit yourself to two questions. If you have any follow-up questions, please reenter the queue. The first question comes from BofA Merrill Lynch.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Firstly, looking at the external environment, including overall consumption, it's not very robust. Then in such a context, how does the company evaluate its performance in the first half of the year? And as to the second half of the year, what's the company's business plan, investment opportunities, and what is the outlook of the company's performance in the second half of the year?
Thank you for your question. First of all, we believe we are in an industry with huge potential that will also need a long timeframe to develop. We have maintained our strategic composure regardless of external changes and internal adjustments.
We have maintained our focus, that is, realizing the goal of the first entry point for national health consumption. We've continued to build our internal strength and cemented our foundational business while promoting incremental innovation for high quality growth. We want to improve our service quality and also access to our services. Over the past half year, we have continued to consolidate our foundation while pursuing growth, which could not have been successful without our efforts to refine our strengths and capabilities. First, we continue to fortify our supply chain capabilities, including improving our relations with upstream brands. And the merchants on our platform have also grown more active, leading to more merchants operating on a scale of up to RMB 100 million and more blockbuster products with sales of RMB 100 million.
And more surprisingly, due to our strategic investments and our many measures, we have increased a customer awareness of our low price advantage. Second, we continue to build a professional online medical service platform, which is reflected in our efforts to improve our online specialty care services. And third, we also place a lot of emphasis on technological applications and innovation, especially with the implementation of our large language model in various scenarios. Once again, we validated the value of technology in improving cost efficiencies, and innovation, and operational growth. So overall, in the first half of the year, our core categories have been gaining market share consistently. For example, our pharmaceutical category has been growing far faster than our offline competitors.
This is also why we've been able to consolidate our advantage in gaining more upstream partners and as well as customers' trust. Meanwhile, we have validated some new models. For instance, we have integrated our testing orders from the online hospital from at-home rapid testing, which is then further synergized with pharmaceutical purchase. This was really unique in the industry, but overall, of course, there were also problems that we need to face head-on, such as in user acquisition, where there is still a lot to do, and improving the user penetration to our website and user conversion outside the website. Moving on to the second half of the year, our top priority remains to be growth, but it must be high-quality growth.
We'll take targeted measures to enhance investments to make sure that our core categories see an increase in market share and on a sustainable basis. We'll continue to play to our advantages and seize opportunities. The key is to take advantage of our online and offline advantages. We will also improve the commercialization of new pharmaceutical products. On the other hand, we can use specialized services to increase users' mindshare. We also hope to provide clearer guidance to customers in drug use, and we'll also improve our services to the elderly population, for instance, to lead... We'll provide help to users to help them select suitable products. Secondly, we will actively respond to government policies.
I believe you've seen recently, the State Council just released opinions on promoting high-quality development of service consumption, specializing the promotion of health consumption and internet plus, healthcare. The priority is to strengthening physical examination, health consultations, and management, and other new business, service business formats. This is the latest guideline document on the national level, which aligns perfectly with our innovative initiatives over the past year, including our poly clinic business, online consultations, and health management and service innovations. Well, our development benefited from these new policies, and this has injected confidence in our, in our development. Also, medical insurance payments is now possible for online purchases. This was a great incentive for us.
It provided policy guarantee for our further development, especially in the second half of the year, and this further provided assurance to us and our ecosystem partners. This was a great news for the industry. We believe improving the healthcare system is key. On the one hand, we'll continue to consolidate the closed loop capabilities development for online services, such as online consultation, plus testing, then plus pharmacy, forming a closed loop. On the other hand, relying on our service system, we hope to provide services to hospitals, clinics, and physical examination centers for forming closed loops with these services. This is another area for us to improve. Meanwhile, we'll strategically promote the development of localized services, including on-demand retail and the offline physical examination center.
So that we will not only have strong online capabilities, but a significant offline presence and support as well. So this is a brief overview of our first half performance and outlook for the second half. Let me speak more specifically. Overall, we believe we've achieved high-quality growth in the first half. For instance, our core categories have achieved faster growth that is far faster than industry average, and there's been consistent improvements in our growth and net profit margin, reflection of our increased efficiencies and also customer experience. Looking forward to the second half, we believe its performance will exceed that of the first half, especially for revenue growth, and we have confidence we could achieve double-digit growth. And more significantly, we want to further gain market share, and we also hope to achieve further increase in net profit.
Thank you very much for your answer. The next question comes from CICC.
Thank you very much for taking my question. My question is regarding the latest policies on pharmaceutical retail, such as the price, the price comparison policy and medical insurance payments. Then what is the impact of such policies on the company and the industry? Thank you.
Thank you for your question. This is a very good question. These policies released recently, I think, fully demonstrate the purpose of the national medical insurance system, that is to provide convenience and benefits to the people. And, the online medical insurance payment make drug purchase more convenient, and the price comparison policy can improve drug price transparency, lowering people's burdens. And for e-commerce platforms like JD Health, gaining the trust of the medical insurance system is important for our future development.
So far, we have launched the medical insurance payment in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and together in five cities for on-demand retail. And in Beijing, in particular, we have taken the lead in the online purchase projects with medical insurance payments. Specifically, we have seen increased traffic. The areas with medical insurance payments for online purchases have experienced a big increase in traffic. And in Beijing, for example, order volume nearly doubled, and our O2O scenario allows more users to know about this, and also allow them, and more of them, to try our instant delivery services while promoting cross repeat purchases amongst users. And secondly, our distinctive omni-channel pharmaceutical retail model is currently taking shape.
Our instant delivery service relies on our robust supply chain advantages, abundant platform traffic, and high-quality user base, allowing a perfect integration of our O2O business with the B2C business, forming omni-channel synergies. Given our coverage of both online and offline service scenarios, we are laying a solid foundation for our future exploration of the B2C model with medical insurance payments. As to the price comparison policy, I think it means that this could reduce the medical insurance expenses, and it also means that the past model of relying on high growth margin products to support high operating costs would no longer be viable. Our advantage in drug purchase convenience, price competitiveness, and information transparency is becoming more apparent.
So we'll continue our low price advantage, reinforce our price competitiveness, expand supply chain advantage, elevate our professional service capabilities, all the while closely following policy changes, so we could service our customers better. So to sum up, pharmaceutical e-commerce platforms as a very efficient business format, I think will attract even more attention from the medical insurance system. The online purchases would become more important, meaning more cities will have medical insurance payments enabled for online purchases, and we're really looking forward to it. And this would have some impact on offline purchases as well, including in pricing. But I believe there may be tougher regulations.
Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Goldman Sachs.
Thank you for taking my question. My question is regarding selling products through live streaming. Recently, there has been some compliance guidance on this topic. Now, what's the impact on the company's medical devices and health product business? Will it make a difference? Thank you.
Over the past few years, the live streaming market in China has been developing very fast, and it has affected user behaviors. So that's the upside. It has spread awareness to users about certain medical devices and healthcare products. And, but there is also a downside or problems, such as exaggerated efficacy and false advertising. The regulatory documents released recently further clarified the platform's management responsibility and commercial marketing behaviors, specifying that practitioners in the live streaming industry cannot indirectly publish advertising for three types of products and medical devices.
We think this is very necessary and significant because it's conducive to compliant operations for live streaming, and especially for long-term steady development of the live streaming industry. This would be a very important guarantee. We have also been trying selling products with live streaming, for example, during the Double Eleven promotion, and we have made a lot of efforts. But essentially, we are still using the shelf-based e-commerce model, which is fundamentally different from live streaming e-commerce. During Double Eleven last year, we released a series of favorable policies for our users to promote our product. Going forward, we'll continue to use live streaming in our business, but more importantly, we have built more mature supply chain system and enriched product supply and after-sale services.
For products such as health products, pharmaceuticals, and food for special medical purposes, as well as medical devices, their growth cannot rely simply on traffic or impulse purchase, but on strong supply chain capabilities and professional services, and also customers' high levels of trust and sense of security. Only this will benefit the consumers more. During the June 18th promotion, we realized that consumers sometimes suffer from information asymmetry or lack of judgment when buying health products. We invited doctors, pharmacists, nutritionists, and psychological therapists to join us in live streaming to help customers make decisions about buying these products, to make informed decisions. We allow them to buy such products more reasonably with the help of more information, and we believe that this would give the users a sense of security.
For instance, our nutritionist consultation service, since it was launched in 2020, we now have nearly 1,000 dieticians and nutritionists, with consultation volume nearly doubling year-over-year. Replies within 30 seconds accounted for over 95% from our doctors, with an average of five rounds of communication between users and doctors. This shows professional services with very objective provision of information, and this could lead to continual repeat purchases from the users.
Thank you.
The next question comes from UBS.
Thank you, management. My question is regarding the progress of the company's innovative business. For example, in medical consultations, and we learned that there have been some organizational changes in JD Family Doctor. Could you tell us more about the changes and its impact on the company?
Yes. Thank you. Adjusting the organization of JD Family Doctor is a proactive choice that we made. For us, compared with online hospitals, the family doctor business is more like an innovative product that's based on the online medical service model, providing health management services. That's why we merged its 2C services with our online medical service business unit, out of consideration for cost efficiencies.
As you know, users don't actually have a high purchase rate of the family doctor membership services, with insufficient product, product penetration, because this requires a long-term cultivation of user habits and trust. Since this is the only product of its kind in China. And compared with its, compared with standalone development, merging would be better for resource consolidation optimization, while achieving business synergies. And this, I think, would give us more time to increase our user penetration. As to online medical services, we are further validating the key specialties for which we could provide closed loop services. This is the key value of online medical services. For our dermatology specialty, for instance, we have been achieving one breakthrough after another, and basically, we have improved online experience, and our focus was to improve users' experience.
So for dermatology, we now have over 5,000 registered doctors, including nearly 3,000 from top-tier hospitals, covering four secondary outpatient departments, including higher and pediatric dermatology. And we have launched 49 single disease expert clinics. So basically, after a year of intense efforts, we have gathered the top skin, dermatology experts nationwide. And in terms of product supply, we now have over 3,000 skincare products and non-pharmaceutical products, ranking number one in the industry. And by establishing deep collaborations with upstream pharmaceutical companies, we can ensure the efficient, safe, controllable delivery of skin, of skincare medications from the source to the patients. And in addition, we have been applying our AI large language models in our online consultation processes. We have built the industry's most professional medical large model database.
Including applications for doctors, and this significantly improved doctors' online practice experience, reducing costs for users and, offering faster response to users with better service quality. So for online services, like I said, testing capability is very important. We mentioned, before our, rapid testing brand. It was launched not long ago. And now we have combined it with other services. For instance, after launching the testing for, respiratory virus infections, we also launched testing for hand, foot-and-mouth disease, and our testing capabilities now, cover urine tests as well, so the tests that can be done, for users at home. So we have been broadening the boundaries of online hospitals. With test results, doctors would know better how to help their patients. Supplementing our capabilities helped us form a true, closed loop service, encompassing medical services, testing, and pharmaceuticals.
For the second half of the year, we'll extend this closed loop service to more cities, increasing more testing items. We could also send nurses to users' homes, for instance. We can achieve a testing, diagnosis, rehabilitation, and elderly care all in users' homes, and we believe this would open up bigger market for us.
Thank you.
Next question comes from Haitong Securities.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Regarding the Jingyi Qianxun large language model, what is its latest R&D update? What service scenarios will it be used, and how, what impact of this, of its application in efficiency improvement?
Well, first of all, the large language models have a lot of potential in medical scenarios.... And two factors are at play here for its success. One is technology, the other is scenario, and I think we do have advantages in both areas. I think we are determined to make consistent investments in the medical area, as you can see from the scale of our online consultations and products and the diversity of our medical departments. So here we do have an advantage, and this would help us improve the performance of our products, giving us a leading edge. Currently, our products include to C, to B, and also to doctors. But for the to C product, we have launched Kangkang, a consulting large language model.
Leveraging our advantages in large language model and the combination of physical products and services, we have been able to resolve many problems and recommend solutions to users. As to doctors, we use AI to help with doctors' diagnosis, to help doctor make decisions and provide reference for them while increasing their efficiency. So far, we see that its application has significantly shortened the time our doctors spent on each patient. We also have products targeting medical institutions, like we have this polyclinic center, providing testing reports. So our database also has past physical examination reports of our users and other database, that can help doctors be more efficient when writing conclusions for physical examination reports.
We mentioned before that we have products for hospitals as well, which can also increase the efficiency of patients' doctor visits. We provide in-hospital navigation services, for instance, that help users navigate the hospital. These may not sound very big, but I think they all have great potential. Another achievement in the first half of the year is that in the testing for Chinese language, medical large language models, our Jing Tian Xun ranked number one with a comprehensive score of 92.4. This reflects the success of this model. Going forward, we believe a large language model, especially its application medical scenarios, is still at an early stage. I believe going forward, we will see great breakthroughs in user experience driven by large language models.
We're really looking forward to further achievement to share with you. Thank you.