Chinese local services platform Meituan-Dianping recently announced a restructuring plan in an internal memo circulated to employees, marking the company’s first restructuring since its IPO as the O2O giant is ramping up its “food+platform” initiative to reaffirm its mission of helping people “eat better and live better.”
According to the memo, Meituan is setting up three new units, including a user platform and two business groups with a respective focus on the at-home (delivering services to consumers’ doorstep) and in-store (bringing consumers to the businesses) end.
Meituan will set up a user platform consisting of a subset of Meituan/Dianping/service experience platforms, aiming to enhance Meituan’s services capacity and improve consumers’ experience.
Additionally, the company is consolidating business lines such as dining out, hotel booking, domestic vacation, marketing platform (branded ads, etc), RMS (SaaS-based cashier system) other in-store services under a new in-store business group, whilst creating a new at-home business group that comprises of services including delivery services (food and grocery) and smart kitchen business.
There are some other personnel changes, too. Chen Liang, who led Meituan’s success in its rise against Ctrip in China’s online travel market, got transferred to lead the fresh food retailing business, highlighting Meituan’s determination in the business amidst China’s current fresh goods community buy fad.
All in all, the ultimate goal is to build a multi-level technology platform to link the demand and supply side of lifestyle services together to better serve Meituan’s clients whether it be the merchants or users.
Meituan has been making a name for itself with its unique strategies that have seen the firm expand beyond just being a Groupon and Yelp-like copycat. And this latest development to tweak its strategy after its public listing might be due to the rise of the new challenger – Alibaba’s newly formed rival entity – the merger of Ele.me and Koubei.
Editor: Ben Jiang
