WM Motor and Meituan Dache came into strategic cooperation on January 30th, 2019. WM motor and Meituan Dache will cooperate to improve users’ car-hailing experience and offer better services upon the feedbacks collected during practice.
According to EO Auto, WM Motor (威马汽车) and Meituan Dache (美团打车, Meituan car-hailing platform) came into strategic cooperation on January 30th, 2019. WM motor and Meituan Dache will cooperate to improve users’ car-hailing experience and offer better services upon the feedbacks collected during practice.
WM Motor is one of the frontiers among China’s EV makers that has EV mass production and started to deliver EV to its customers in September 2018, while others are struggling with mass production and postponed delivery issues. During the strategic cooperation, Meituan Dache will introduce WM Motor’s first mass production EV (Electric Vehicle) model EX5 to its car-hailing platform.
Meituan Dache as a car-hailing platform is a product line under Meituan’s structure. Meituan is the largest local life service platform in China and provides services both 2C (to customer) and 2B (to business) including accommodation, dining, take-out, e-commerce, transportation solutions (like Mobike and Dache), and so on. Comparing to DiDi, who has approximately 90% market share, Meituan Dache is a latecomer that launched in February 2017 but in cities it launched, Meituan Dache has made some progress. According to Sinolinks Securities, Meituan Dache’s first nine months’ average MAU (monthly active user) in Shanghai was tantamount to DiDi’s 82%; after operating six months in Shanghai, Meituan Dache’s market share was nearly 32% of DiDi, which proved that the latecomer still has the chance to take a piece from the cake.
Considering DiDi’s recent move, Meituan Dache might be a more ideal partner for WM Motor. DiDi previously announced its cooperation with BJEV (北汽新能源, the EV line of BAIC) to found an EV company to stretch into the EV market. Being an EV maker, BJEV is one of the competitors for WM Motor. DiDi may open similar service or initiate similar cooperation with EV makers, but at least now, DiDi is tightly connected with BJEV, which is not a piece of supportive information for WM Motor. Though DiDi and Meituan Dache is competing for the market share, WM Motor’s cooperation with Meituan is a part of its strategy to reshape people’s life, at least on the traffic side.
Earlier this month, WM Motor launched its car rental service in Hainan and aimed to open the traveling market for its car rental business. Purchasing a car might be a time-costly decision to be made, but car rental is not. WM Motor tries to introduce its EV through car rental business and presents a different lifestyle that EV stands for. Car-hailing service is another approach for it to presents a different possibility of life. Plus, the approach has a marketing effect. For the same reason, Meituan Dache introduces different options for its users to satisfy different needs.