J&T Global Express has delivered the kind of first-half numbers that usually make public-market investors sit up.
The Hong Kong-listed logistics company reported revenue of US$7.67 billion for the first half of 2026, up 39.5 per cent year-on-year, while express delivery revenue rose 39.6 per cent to US$7.46 billion. Adjusted net profit more than doubled to US$350.6 million, and adjusted EBIT climbed 121.7 per cent to US$433.6 million.
The headline story is clear enough: J&T is still expanding quickly, still riding the growth of e-commerce, and now important enough to have joined the Hang Seng Index in June. For Southeast Asia, where the company has held the largest express delivery market share for six consecutive years, its performance also speaks to the region’s growing weight inside global logistics.
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But beneath the strong top-line figures, J&T’s interim results tell a more complicated story. Its fastest growth is no longer coming from China, the company’s largest market by parcel volume. Its improvement in revenue per parcel appears to be driven partly by a shift in geographic mix rather than clear pricing power. And its enlarged HK$2 billion (~US$255 million) share repurchase programme raises questions about how the company is balancing investor returns against long-term network investment.
China is still huge, but growth is slowing
J&T handled 17.50 billion parcels globally in the first half, up 25.1 per cent from a year earlier. Yet that growth was far from evenly spread.
China remained the group’s biggest market by some distance, contributing 11.62 billion parcels, or about two-thirds of total volume. But parcel volume in China grew only 9.6 per cent year-on-year. That is modest compared with the company’s performance elsewhere: Southeast Asia parcel volume jumped 71.2 per cent to 5.52 billion, while “other markets”, mainly Latin America and the Middle East, rose 119.9 per cent to 365 million parcels.
The gap matters because China has long been the world’s most competitive express delivery market. Years of price wars among players such as SF Express, ZTO Express, YTO Express and others have pushed down delivery tariffs and made scale essential. J&T’s market share in China did edge up by 0.5 percentage points to 11.6 per cent, but the single-digit volume growth suggests the company may be bumping into a tougher ceiling in its largest market.
Management has framed this as a move towards better-quality growth. Group Vice President Charles Hou said J&T remains focused on “strengthening operating quality and efficiency”. That is a reasonable priority in a low-margin business. Still, for investors and regional operators, the question is whether China is becoming a cash-heavy but slower-growth base while Southeast Asia and newer markets are asked to carry the expansion story.
The revenue-per-parcel question
One of the more striking parts of J&T’s results is that revenue grew much faster than parcel volume. Overall revenue rose 39.5 per cent, while parcel volume increased 25.1 per cent. On a simple calculation, the company’s average revenue per parcel increased from about US$0.393 in the first half of 2025 to US$0.438 in the first half of 2026.
At first glance, that looks like stronger pricing power. For a logistics company, being able to earn more per parcel while still growing volume is a strong signal. But in J&T’s case, the explanation may be more about geography.
In the first half of 2025, China accounted for roughly three-quarters of J&T’s parcels. By the first half of 2026, its share had fallen to 66.37 per cent. Southeast Asia’s share, meanwhile, rose from 23.05 per cent to 31.54 per cent. Because delivery rates in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets are generally higher than in China’s fiercely competitive domestic market, a larger share of non-China parcels can lift group average revenue per parcel even without a major pricing breakthrough.
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This does not make the improvement meaningless. A healthier geographic mix can support margins, and Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market still has room to grow as online shopping penetrates smaller cities and cross-border sellers seek faster fulfilment. But it does mean the ARPU gain should be read with care. If Southeast Asian markets become more crowded, or if platform-owned logistics arms intensify competition, J&T may face the same pressure on delivery fees that has shaped China’s market.
Southeast Asia is the prize and the battleground
J&T’s Southeast Asian performance remains its strongest argument. The region delivered 5.52 billion parcels in the first half, helped by rising e-commerce adoption, social commerce, and the demand for low-cost delivery across archipelagic and emerging markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
The company has also built a dense regional network, including 127 sorting centres in Southeast Asia. That infrastructure is hard to replicate quickly and gives J&T an advantage in markets where delivery reliability can determine whether consumers continue buying online.
But it is not alone. In Southeast Asia, J&T competes with Ninja Van, Flash Express, SPX Express, Lazada Logistics, DHL eCommerce and country-specific postal and courier players. Some rivals are backed by major e-commerce platforms, giving them captive parcel flows. Others are pushing aggressively into small merchants and cash-on-delivery-heavy markets. Globally, J&T’s expansion into Latin America and the Middle East also puts it closer to established logistics groups and regional specialists with deep local networks.
That competitive backdrop makes capital allocation especially important.
A large buyback at a sensitive moment
J&T said it had completed the repurchase of 99.32 million shares and increased the size of its share repurchase plan to US$256.4 million. The company also reported total cash resources of US$2.91 billion, giving it financial room to manoeuvre.
Buybacks are not inherently problematic. They can signal management confidence, improve earnings per share, and return excess cash to shareholders. But for a logistics company still expanding across multiple regions, a repurchase plan of this size deserves scrutiny. The US$256.4 million programme is equivalent to about 73 per cent of the company’s adjusted net profit for the half-year.
The timing is also notable. J&T’s inclusion in the Hang Seng Index brings greater visibility, but also greater pressure from institutional investors and index-tracking funds. A buyback can help support market confidence during that transition. The trade-off is that every dollar used to repurchase shares is a dollar not used to strengthen sorting centres, last-mile capacity, automation, fleet efficiency, or market entry in expensive new geographies.
There is another layer to the numbers. J&T’s announcement highlights adjusted net profit, adjusted EBIT and adjusted EBIT per parcel, but does not foreground statutory net income in the same way. Adjusted metrics are useful for understanding operating performance, especially in businesses affected by non-cash charges or one-off items. Still, investors need the unadjusted picture too, because costs excluded from adjusted earnings can remain economically real.
J&T also promoted a milestone in the second quarter: global average daily parcel volume exceeded 100 million for the first time. That is operationally significant. Yet across the full first half, 17.50 billion parcels over 181 days works out to about 96.7 million parcels a day. The company is clearly operating at immense scale, but the distinction shows how selective framing can make performance appear cleaner than it is.
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For Southeast Asia, the lesson is not that J&T is weakening. It remains a formidable logistics player with regional scale that few competitors can match. The more important point is that its future growth story now depends heavily on this region continuing to expand profitably.
If China keeps slowing and Southeast Asia absorbs more of the growth burden, J&T will have to prove that its regional dominance can translate into durable margins — not just higher group averages created by geographic mix. Its first-half results are impressive. They are also a reminder that in logistics, scale is only half the story. The harder test is whether that scale keeps producing real profits once the easy volume growth fades.
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