The path to success
When Meituan was founded in 2010, it was initially positioned as the Groupon of China, providing daily deals and group discounts. Despite the company's fast revenue growth, it faced steep challenges from numerous competitors. As it emerged as a lucrative blue ocean market, many large technology companies, as well as start-ups, tried to establish their businesses in group buying. In 2012, more than 6,000 companies were involved in coupon-selling businesses in China, while half of them went bankrupt due to the high competition.Meituan's strategy to gain market share was to provide coupons for local services and expand into new verticals, such as online food delivery, hotel, and movie ticket booking.
2015 marked another milestone in Meituan’s development. In October that year, Meituan announced its merger with Dianping, the second-largest couponing website at the time. Chinese tech giant Tencent invested over four billion dollars in Meituan-Dianping over the next couple of years. Since 2015, the company's revenue and transacting users soared, making it the undisputed market leader. The joint venture company filed for an IPO in Hong Kong in 2018, raising 55 billion U.S. dollars - making it one of the biggest unicorn-exits in history. In 2020, the company retained “Meituan” and rebranded, dropping the Diaping name. Today, Meituan is China’s most prominent local service provider, with about 680 million annual transacting users and 9.3 million active merchants across all platforms.
Meituan’s business sphere
While food delivery and hotel booking still take up the majority of its revenue, many initiatives have been launched, such as fresh e-commerce platform Meituan Maicai, community group-buying service Meituan Select, ride-hailing service Meituan Dache, on-demand errand service Meituan Paotui, and q-commerce platform Meituan Shangou.According to a Statista consumer survey in 2022, Meituan Waimai was the most popular online food delivery platform among Chinese consumers. More than four-fifths of surveyed Chinese said they used Meituan Waiwai for ordering food in the past year. Towards the end of 2022, Meituan Waimai recorded nearly 70 million monthly active users. Furthermore, Meituan Select, a community group-buying platform launched in 2020 also saw success in terms of MAUs on its WeChat mini program.
