On December 1st, Wang Xing, CEO of Meituan-Dianping, announced the company’s latest organizational upgrade through an internal letter, which set off business structure reform and focused on the four LBS scenarios of store, home, travel and travel. Among them, Meituan-Dianping will coordinate fresh retail, takeout, delivery, catering B2B and other businesses, strengthen takeaway distribution network, build fresh retail and other new capabilities, and comprehensively layout the large retail ecosystem.
Times are changing rapidly. From the traditional offline retail era to the e-commerce era and now to the new retail era, Meituan Dianping has gone through seven years of struggle. We cannot ignore the advantages behind each of its changes. These capabilities are inseparable from meituan-Dianping’s long-term business advantages and experience.
Hematopoietic foundation: takeaway delivery system has a strong foundation
As the saying goes, the economic base determines the superstructure. If big retail is the superstructure, meituan-Dianping’s takeout and delivery business is the “economic foundation” of big retail. Up to now, Meituan-Dianping has completed more than 16 million orders per day, with more than 250 million users, covering more than 1,300 cities, more than 500,000 active delivery riders, and more than 2 million cooperative merchants, accounting for nearly 60% of the market share.
These advantages can first lay a good foundation for Meituan-Dianping to enter fresh food retail, and build a moat in the new field as soon as possible. Hema has a delivery circle of 3 kilometers and half an hour, and Yonghui Super Species also built its own delivery system and took 30 minutes as the fastest delivery time. For Meituan-Dianping, the logistics team has been relatively mature and is still expanding, which is an obvious existing advantage for the efficient logistics and distribution system required by large retailers. In the past, takeaway delivery with a solid foundation has changed from a single takeaway to a more diversified urban life delivery service and expanded from B2C to B2B delivery, and undoubtedly has become an important role in supporting its business expansion.
For example, in catering B2B services, Meituan-Dianping launched “Fast Donkey delivery” to provide replenishingservices for merchants. In addition, In May 2016, Meituan-Dianping announced the establishment of a catering ecological platform, focusing on promoting the IT system construction, IT system standardization and Internet of catering businesses.
Visible, on side B of the dealer service system construction, Meituan reviews have done a lot of preparation, from a technical, logistics, product such as direction of multi-dimensional B side can assign of the business, and logistics team in which the role of self-evident, after all, service to the C has honed logistics team to fulfill the diversified demands of comprehensive ability, so B side distribution is relatively easy. Enter the big retail, inevitably not takeout, fresh, B2B business integration, and these businesses rely on the basis of survival, is logistics. Therefore, the gradual development and rich experience of the logistics team can lay a shot in the arm for Meituan-Dianping’s layout of large-scale retail in advance, and become an important driving force for the hematopoietic large-scale retail ecosystem.
Hematopoietic motivation: the ability to explore and innovate new business
Previously, Wang Huiwen, senior vice president of Meituan-Dianping, also gave the principles for Meituan-Dianping to explore new businesses, which can be summarized as three points: whether it is superior to existing market businesses, whether it has synergistic value, and whether the scale meets the standard. Without continuous exploration and innovation, meituan-Dianping would not have its current comprehensive business structure. Therefore, the motive of hematopoiesis is meituan-Dianping’s new business exploration and innovation ability honed under the market changes, and the “great retail ecology” plan was also born.
It can be seen that Meituan-Dianping’s principle of exploring new businesses is based on certain market demands and market rules, and more deeply, it is centered on the principle of user-centered. For example, Meituan-Dianping mainly focuses on two aspects: whether there is demand from users and whether the market pain point is large enough. According to the survey, 70% of Meituan and Dianping users need a taxi. Meituan-dianping’s low gross profit and low profit model can not only bring quality experience to users, but also increase drivers’ income. It is not surprising that Meituan-Dianping’s taxi service has emerged as The Times require.
Similarly, Meituan-Dianping’s layout of large retail must be a comprehensive consideration of the cross-enabling advantages of the platform’s businesses. In July this year, Meituan-Dianping invested in opening an offline fresh food supermarket named Fish Fresh. In November, Meituan Dianping Dragon Ball announced the completion of its investment in Shanghai community fresh food brand “Kangpinhui”. It can be seen that Meituan-Dianping has already considered the layout of fresh retail.
After the emergence of Hema, Yonghui Super Species and other businesses, users’ demands for fresh retail focus on instant delivery, fresh quality and other aspects. Meituan-dianping’s layout of fresh retail can be described as a pioneer in the large-scale retail ecosystem. In the process of gradually offline layout, Meituan-Dianping can also play the advantages of the existing logistics distribution system and form its own fresh distribution advantage area.
In addition, as market variables in related fields have reached a critical point, the maturity of retail reform is also a major consideration of Meituan-Dianping’s layout of large retail. From the perspective of home, shop, travel and travel, not only do these areas have relatively high growth potential, but also the upgrading of consumer demand is concentrated in these areas, such as the globalization of travel destinations and the fragmentation of demand; Travel demand is stage-based and centralized; Home service efficiency and so on. Meituan-dianping, as a comprehensive lifestyle service platform, has seen the need to upgrade its consumption. It is natural for meituan-Dianping to take advantage of this trend.
In any case, to the big retail ecological layout, the opportunity and the market is indispensable. What we need to do now is to realize the linkage step by step, and finally export high-quality business with higher cost performance to the market, so as to seize the new needs of users after upgrading.
Hematopoietic potential: the imagination space of super platform
Wang huiwen once admitted that Meituan-Dianping had explored several businesses, including breakfast delivery, queuing machine, WiFi and other nearly 10 businesses. The original intention of exploring business is to expand the business capacity of Meituan Dianping and further enrich users’ choices.
From group buying in the PC era to food delivery and integrated lifestyle services in the mobile era, Meituan Dianping is expanding its capacity to meet the diverse needs of its users. Today, Meituan-Dianping’s business has been expanded into group buying, takeout, hotels, tourism, b&B, movies, in-store integration, fresh food, travel and other areas, which is inseparable from meituan-Dianping’s mission of “helping people eat better and live better”. From a comprehensive platform to a super platform, the continuous expansion of Meituan Dianping has two obvious advantages.
First of all, from the perspective of demand, the efficiency of supply and demand docking between users and merchants is improved, and the diversified needs of users can be better satisfied. This is just like jd tmall, an integrated e-commerce platform, where users’ shopping needs are not just a single item. Meituan-dianping aims to provide one-stop life services, including the upcoming travel business, based on a large number of life services.
Secondly, from the point of view of cost, such as the reduction of customer cost and logistics cost, the cost advantage expands. In the process of becoming a super platform, meituan-Dianping’s integration and professionalism will save users more time and thus reduce customer acquisition costs. Simply put, users know meituan-Dianping is a super platform and will naturally seek relevant services.
In addition, multi-dimensional matching of supply and demand brings distribution logistics cost advantage. Business integration under large retail will improve the accuracy of supply and demand matching, multiple needs of the same user can be met at one time, and logistics costs are greatly reduced. The fixed part of customer acquisition cost and logistics cost is very high, while the variable cost is very low. The emergence of super platform will gradually release scale effect, reduce cost, and bring more profit space for business and the whole industry. Behind the huge imagination space of super platform, the sustainable hematopoietic ability of large retail ecology will also be verified.
After The retail reform of Alibaba and JINGdong, the imagination space lies in the value mining of dual-line user traffic, which also caused the transaction volume of this year’s Singles’ Day to increase sharply. For Meituan-Dianping, the layout choice of big retail will first reconstruct the business ecosystem, so that the interconnection and empowerment of the four business segments will be closer. At the same time, with the support of takeaway delivery system, Meituan-Dianping’s large-scale retail has stronger fault tolerance, which not only reduces costs, but also improves the operation efficiency of the retail industry. With the continuous expansion of categories, there is a huge imagination space for its future scale effect.
Liu Kuang, meditation on the Internet, wechat official account: Liukuang110