Meituan

Meituan plans to raise around $3 billion in what would be its largest regular bond issuance ever, as the company faces intensifying competition in China’s food delivery market.

Alibaba Group Holding said the destination ranking feature in its Amap mapping service has racked up 400 million users since being launched last month, as the tech giant doubles down on efforts to challenge rival delivery platform Meituan in local services. Amap Street Stars, launched on September 10 to provide artificial intelligence-based rankings for restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions, has so far been used by 400 million users, nearly half of Amap’s monthly active users, Alibaba said...

Amap, Alibaba Group Holding’s answer to Google Maps, saw a record 360 million daily users on the first day of China’s “golden week” National Day holiday, as the company strengthens its local service offerings amid increasing competition with Meituan. On Wednesday, the first day of the extended eight-day break, Amap provided navigation for trips totalling over 9 billion km, also a record high, according to Alibaba, owner of the Post. Meanwhile, Amap’s new road safety alert system, Eagle Eye...

Alibaba Group Holding’s competition with Meituan is expanding from instant commerce into the bricks-and-mortar market, as the Hangzhou-based tech conglomerate prepares to offer discounted in-store dining vouchers to consumers on the mainland. That new initiative is expected to start on Saturday in selected districts in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Jiaxing, a city in eastern Zhejiang province, according to a report on Friday by local media outlet LatePost, which cited unnamed sources. Alibaba, owner of...

Since April, mainland Chinese consumers have been spoiled for choice, as instant commerce competition brought dazzling promotional subsidies and speedy deliveries right to their doorsteps. Instant commerce – a turbocharged combination of online shopping and swift dispatch – had already made a typical lunchbox order cost around US$1 or US$2, which covered the food and the delivery fee. On-demand delivery giant Meituan’s “Grouping for Good Meals” campaign, for example, offered a four-dish set meal...

Alibaba's mapping app Amap is moving away from its traditional focus on navigation and encroaching into rival Meituan's local-lifestyle territory...

Alibaba Group Holding on Wednesday launched an artificial intelligence-powered ranking feature on its online mapping service Amap, as the tech giant doubles down on AI applications and deepens its rivalry with food delivery leader Meituan. Amap Street Stars, a ranking featured on the app’s homepage, used AI algorithms to rank offline destinations including restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions, to “advance Amap’s role as the gateway for lifestyle services”, Alibaba said at the launch event...

Alibaba Group Holding has fired another shot at on-demand delivery giant Meituan, with a campaign that brings merchants from its Tmall business-to-consumer shopping platform onto its Taobao Instant Commerce site. The campaign – dubbed “Jishigou”, which translates to instant purchase in Chinese – has seen more than 260 brands on Alibaba’s Tmall premium retail platform join its instant commerce service, the company said on Tuesday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Taobao Shangou,...

Meituan CEO Wang Xing is rallying employees around the firm’s instant commerce efforts, overseas expansion and greater social security for delivery workers, more than a week after reporting a sharp fall in second-quarter earnings amid a bruising price war with Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com. In his all-hands letter to staff over the weekend that was widely shared online, Wang said Meituan had served more than 770 million users over the past 12 months through the 14.5 million merchants on its...

On-demand local services giant Meituan has become the latest Chinese Big Tech company to release an open-source large language model (LLM) to market, more than two years after it acquired mainland AI start-up Light Year for US$281 million. Beijing-based Meituan, the long-standing leader of China’s food delivery market, on Monday released and open-sourced its own LLM, called LongCat-Flash-Chat, via artificial intelligence developer platforms Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as the model’s...