Meituan, a startup, has a remarkable track record. From group-buying to takeout and wine travel, 10-year-old Meituan has become the largest local living service platform in China. Among them, Meituan has basically become a synonym for group-buying, and the market share of takeout has also reached more than half. Among China’s listed Internet companies, Meituan, as a start-up company, has been the third largest by market value for nearly half a year, with a latest market value of hk $577.1 billion. This marks a high degree of approval for the company’s digital business model from users to capital markets. Meituan entrepreneurial decade, is also a big wave of China’s mobile Internet entrepreneurship decade. There have been a lot of star companies, but more of them are transient peers. But even in China’s Internet world, known for its purgatory entrepreneurial environment, Meituan is a company with a unique ethos.The success of Meituan cannot be separated from the following three points:
- Always adhere to user experience: no consumer refund, overdue refund, free booking, movie online seat selection, Meituan always make consumer experience to the extreme.
- Advance layout in the mobile era: group-buying and LBS business are highly identical, and their advance layout in mobile terminal is at least half a year ahead of competitors.
- Investment in technology: even in the most difficult times, Meituan has always insisted that it is an Internet company, with investment in technology and background. While others are struggling to manage sales teams and merchants, Meituan’s system can capture, collect, upload and review merchant information via mobile phones.
The Wall Street journal used the following chart to describe Meituan’s business, and while it may not be accurate, the benchmark itself is a compliment.
Through an overview of the development history of Meituan in the first ten years, we can find that Meituan has grasped the rising trend of the local life service industry and realized omni-directional traffic entrance through the layout of multiple business segments, thus helping the high-frequency business to drive the low-frequency business and form the traffic cross-realization.
Among them, the most important 2C business of Meituan is takeout. In 2013, Meituan officially launched Meituan takeout, and its takeout business responds to the consumer side’s pursuit of convenience and the merchant side’s pursuit of improving efficiency.Since its launch, Meituan takeout has become a worthy leading enterprise. According to the data of Trustdata, Meituan takeout 2019Q3 has a market share of 65.8%, and its market share is still rising.
With the advent of the digital age, the takeaway market has grown very rapidly in recent years. For takeaway logistics systems, distribution efficiency and user experience are critical. The actual delivery process is ultimately completed by the delivery person (rider). Therefore, to really improve the delivery efficiency, we must not only work on the intelligent dispatching system (order assignment, path planning, ETA), but also continuously improve the “Additional” ability, let them send more faster. Taking this as a starting point, the Meituan R & D team designed the rider’s intelligent assistant to comprehensively improve the rider’s ability in all aspects.
Meituan Takeaway started in 2013 and currently can serve approximately 250 million users, covering more than 1,300 cities, serving more than 2 million merchants, and peak daily orders exceeding 18 million. Meituan’s intelligent delivery dispatch system matches more than 500,000 rider every day. Based on massive data and artificial intelligence algorithms, it ensures that the average delivery time does not exceed 28 minutes. This is also the world’s largest and most complex multi-person, multi-point real-time intelligent distribution scheduling system.
“Tech companies don’t want to disrupt traditional offline companies. They must integrate development, help traditional businesses, and help them digitalize.” On November 8, 2018, Meituan founder and CEO Wang Xing said at the Internet conference.
There is also a hidden crisis behind the Meituan business line. The commissions of major takeaway platforms have been increasing in recent years, and the pressure on many SMEs has risen. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, many catering industry associations have also called on the platform to reduce commissions, which is also evident.
On the other hand, with the expansion of the business line, Meituan is also facing strong management pressure. The Meituan said that one month since the end of January, it recruited 75,000 new delivery staff. Talents who understand management are another big challenge for Meituan.
In the past ten years, Meituan has created a business legend in the Chinese Internet industry. Its digital business model is worthy of our learning. Let us wait and see what kind of legend the Meituan will write in the future.
Sources:
Liza Lin(2018).Meituan Wants to Be the Grubhub of China. https://on.wsj.com/2MfSyxf
Jun Jiao(2019). The second curve of Meituan. http://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/H3_AP201909081351075073_1.pdf
Meituan technical team(2020). Meituan takeaway rider behind AI technology. https://www.infoq.cn/article/PEiIXWoOujFHqT4tCSGy
Shuai Zhuang(2020). From the retail e-commerce platform’s “anti-epidemic” ability to see the loss and benefit of Meituan. http://static.hongzhoukan.com/2020/02/11/594253.html
Liang Yang(2020). Meituan ten years. https://www.iyiou.com/p/124470.html
Hello world 
Hi Liuyi, your blog topic is interesting. Through your description, this reflects the impact and role of digital business models on the development of Meituan over the past 10 years. For Meituan, the digital business model is the key to its continuous development. With the increasing popularity of digitalization, people have a higher demand for digital business companies such as Meituan Takeaway. The advent of Meituan Takeaway has provided greater convenience to people today. This is the charm of the digital age. In addition, in the end, what you asked about the challenges that Meituan will encounter is a good idea. Although Meituan Takeaway has become a leading company in the takeaway industry, how to better manage a large number of takeaways is one of the important challenges it faces.
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