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Meituan Dianping: Settle all your local needs on one app
A combination of Yelp, Seamless, Uber and more, Meituan Dianping lets users order a range of services all within one app, like food delivery, restaurant deals, movie tickets or hotel bookings.
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This article originally appeared on ABACUS
It’s hard to find a Western equivalent to Meituan Dianping. But what if I told you that it’s like Amazon -- except that people go there to buy services instead of goods?
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It’s the app that hundreds of millions of users in China turn to for food delivery, restaurant deals, movie tickets, hotel and travel bookings, and more.
Meituan was founded in 2010 by Wang Xing. A serial entrepreneur and a PhD dropout, his first big break came when he quit his studies in the US to launch the website that would become Renren -- China’s answer to Facebook. After selling the platform, he created a Twitter lookalike called Fanfou. The service was initially a success, but a government crackdown on social media forced it to shut for more than a year -- a setback it never recovered from.
In 2010, Wang launched Meituan in Beijing as a Groupon-like site. (The name means “beautiful group purchases”.) By the end of 2011, it became the most successful platform of its kind in China, boasting 2.5 billion yuan (US$37 million) of sales in a month. Alibaba soon became one of Meituan’s biggest investors. All this happened before Meituan introduced what is now its most profitable service -- food delivery.
(Alibaba sold its stake in Meituan in 2016. Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)
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