Faced with challenges, Meituan continues to accelerate its strategic expansion.
On February 2, Meituan's CEO Wang Xing announced a new organizational restructuring through an internal email. Since Meituan's announcement of the "Retail + Technology" strategy in 2021, this marks the company's first large-scale adjustment to its organizational structure and personnel.
The email revealed that Meituan has consolidated several core local business-related operations and further elevated the priority of its technology and international-related businesses.
Key adjustments include the integration of the on-demand delivery business group, the in-store business group, Meituan platform, and basic research and development, all reporting to Meituan's Senior Vice President, Wang Puzhong. Dianping, SaaS, bike-sharing, power-bank-sharing businesses will be overseen by Meituan's Senior Vice President, Zhang Chuan. The drone and overseas businesses will report directly to Wang Xing. Other organizational structures will remain unchanged.
With this adjustment, Meituan's exploratory businesses in internationalization and technology will report directly to Wang Xing.
In 2017, during his keynote speech on the "Second Half of the New Economy," Wang Xing proposed three directions for the second half of the internet economy: "up to the sky, into the ground, and globalization." Subsequently, in an internal memo, he designated 2018 as the "first year of Meituan Dianping's global exploration" and gradually expanded the company's internationalization efforts.
In February 2017, Meituan Dianping's Travel and Accommodation business group officially announced its foray into the overseas accommodation business. In 2018, Meituan successively invested in two local life service platforms, Swiggy and Gojek. Gojek is a leading super app platform in the Southeast Asian market, offering services such as ride-hailing, delivery (food, parcels, groceries), online payment, and financial services. In November 2019, Meituan completed another overseas investment, participating in the Series B financing of the mobile payment startup, Opay. The company is a subsidiary of the browser provider Opera, focusing on the African market, and forms a commercial ecosystem with the ride-hailing app ORide and the food delivery app OFood.
In May 2023, Meituan officially launched a new food delivery platform, KeeTa, in Hong Kong, China, and completed its full coverage plan for the entire region ahead of schedule by the end of October of the same year. Currently, KeeTa has accumulated over 1.3 million registered users and holds approximately 37% market share across Hong Kong.
"Currently, both internally and externally, we face various challenges, but at the same time, these are opportunities for the company to further grow," Wang Xing stated. In the future, Meituan will continue to accelerate its expansion around the four key themes of "local, retail, technology, and internationalization."
As of press time, Meituan closed at HKD 63.3 apiece, with a market capitalisation of HKD 395.3 billion.