Chinese online giant Meituan launches new Meituan Delivery platform
Chinese e-commerce giant looks for expansion and to challenge the biggest players in the domestic market with new and more open delivery platform
Meituan has officially launched a new brand "Meituan Delivery" a centrepiece of which is the opening of the service’s technology platform, delivery network and value chains to ecosystem partners.
Meituan’s hope would seem to be to challenge the existing giants of Chinese e-commerce and logistics, Alibaba and JD.com through building a delivery ecosystem that attracts partners from both upstream and downstream segments of the industry chain. The company says that it will work with third-party logistics companies and collaborate with more merchants.
The company says that its on-demand delivery platform is serving more than 3.6 million merchants and 400 million consumers nationwide, covering more than 2,800 cities and counties with nearly 10,000 delivery stations and warehouses and more than 600,000 daily active riders. Meituan's daily food delivery orders exceeded 25 million on April 20, 2019.
It started to build its own delivery network in 2015, primarily to deliver fast food to customers. It launched its Premium Delivery service to meet the surging needs for efficient on-demand food delivery. In 2016, Speedy Delivery service was introduced to diversify its delivery services. Meituan launched its first autonomous delivery vehicle "Xiaodai" in 2018.
Meituan's delivery platform relies on its so-called "Super Brain" – the real-time intelligent dispatch system, which enables Meituan to complete a delivery within 30 minutes on average. The dispatch system can perform about 2.9 billion route planning algorithm operations per hour during daily peak times, and calculate the optimized delivery routes in an average of 0.55 milliseconds, according to Sun Zhizhao, CTO of Meituan Delivery.
Meituan has developed four delivery models - point-to-point shuttle delivery, galaxy network delivery, integrated warehouse inventory delivery, and smart terminal delivery - to serve convenience stores, super markets, retail stores, and office buildings.
"With the opening of our delivery platform, Meituan will leverage our delivery resources to better fulfill diversified needs of users and merchants, while integrating delivery resources to improve the overall urban logistics efficiency," said Wei Wei, general manager of Meituan Delivery.
"Meituan will open its delivery network to more customers and extend the network to various industries," said Wang Puzhong, Meituan senior vice president and president of the Company's at-home business group. "The extension and opening of Meituan's delivery network will help establish a more flexible delivery platform by customizing services for different industries, upgrading our delivery dispatch system, and improving delivery infrastructure."