GET TO KNOW MEITUAN THE NEW SUPER APP IN CHINA
Sep 26, 2018 By NetFin
We all know the China social media marketing giant techs in China like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, among others. But have you heard about Meituan? Meituan started in 2010 as the clone of Groupon in China. It was founded by Wang Xing and same as Groupon, it allows its users to have discounted deals for food and entertainment.
There are other similar apps like Meituan in China, but Wang Xing decided to enter aggressively to the market and he ventured into delivering food, which is a market segment that has become very popular in China in the last years.
After just 5 years of its foundation Meituan merged with Dianping, which is the equivalent of Yelp in China. Doing this smart move, Meituan will become a one-stop-shop in which users can order food, buy discounted entertainment, book a table in a restaurant, get a taxi and even buy a flight ticket. At the moment this merge operation was valued in US$15 billion.
Meituan is backed up by Tencent and with this huge supporter and a lot of strategic moves, Meituan became a huge success in China is worth now more than US$30 billion. It has now more than 300 million users and 4.4 active merchants on its platform.
Its huge success has surprised Chinese market. It has surpassed Ctrip in the number of rooms booked last year as they offer discounted prices in small city hotels.
Meituan has enlarged his service platform by buying Didi, and launching a ride-hailing service in 7 cities of China in which users have digital coupons to use in their rides.
Meituan-Dianping’s last move was to buy Mobike, China’s biggest bike-sharing company worth US$3.7 billion. His biggest rival in this sector is Alibaba-backed ofo.
In terms of payment methods in China, Meituan-Dianping also has its own digital payment service in which users have their own e-wallets to pay the services and acquisitions they made in the app.
Meituan- Dianping has become a super app and is one of the favorites among Chinese users. However, its founder and CEO Wang Xing said he doesn’t aim for Meituan-Dianping to become number 1 app in China. He is looking more to expand horizontally and it is not afraid to step into other areas. He believes that Meituan has the potential to become the next Alibaba or Tencent, but he knows this will take time. For the moment the battle for Meituan goes on.