Meituan hasn't met a challenger for a long time, at least before 2020.

After the group-buying war and takeout war, with listing as the node, Meituan is far ahead in local life. Several Meituan employees told Tech Planet that they felt that the takeout war was over when they went public.

Pinduoduo launched the online shopping business in August 2020, trying to find a second growth curve in addition to e-commerce. A month later, Meituan selected to launch the Thousand cities Plan. "originally, Meituan did not intend to open the city quickly, but Pinduoduo let Meituan speed up," a Meituan preferred person told Tech Planet.

Three months later, Meituan's "stronghold" local life business also appeared a strong "friendly force": byte beating. In December 2020, the Byte Commercialization Department set up a "local direct business center" dedicated to expanding local life business. The main task of the center is to explore customers around life services, cultural tourism and catering industries. At the same time, Hello and DiDi Global Inc. are also eyeing the local life covetously.

Meituan has made continuous profits in the area of local life where profits are calculated in terms of a few cents. It never sets boundaries for itself, attacks everywhere, and always wins without a first-mover advantage.

However, now the situation has changed, almost all Internet companies have become "Meituan", they all want to become big and comprehensive, not big and professional. Meituan's situation has also become more complex-an endless stream of challengers, cyclists' algorithmic cages, delicate relationships with merchants, and stricter regulatory pressure.

Meituan CEO Wang Xing once said on the meal that Meituan's biggest competitor seems to be ele.me, but subverting takeout is more likely to be "unnoticed companies and models". In the business world, the leader can not always take the lead. Meituan needs to face greater pressure and challenges if he wants to create greater glory.

Encircling and suppressing Meituan: all who can come are here.

Around the Spring Festival in 2021, an enterprise called Lianlian Tour in Chengdu welcomed the visits of two major interconnected companies, BABA and JD.com. Their purpose is very simple: to investigate the travel around Lianlian to find feasible investment targets.

An obscure company has suddenly become a target for Internet giants because of its business. The tour around Lianlian aggregates the discount information for different kinds of goods and services, such as catering, hotels, beauty manicures, and so on, and pushes them to local users through the official account of Wechat in the form of articles. Relying on the distribution model, it has covered more than 400 cities across the country in just three years.

This model is very much like an official account version of Dianping. Aware of the crisis, Meituan launched a rapid attack in November last year, launched the "Meituan Youth Festival Club", in order to snipe Lianlian surrounding tourism. The research conducted by BABA's investment department was on the third day after the official opening of the Meituan Festival.

The war between BABA and Meituan in the field of local life has never been extinguished. With ele.me and word-of-mouth at a disadvantage, BABA hopes to invest to narrow the gap with his rivals. But in the end, the investment was not reached.

An employee of the company's surrounding tour said on moments: BABA affirmed the core position of the company in the industry and put forward the advantages of strategic cooperation between the two sides. at the same time, he issued an invitation to Mr. Sun-- looking forward to the future in-depth diversified cooperation between the two sides in various fields, and to achieve win-win cooperation at an early date.

"We only went there once, BABA should also be, but we will not vote. "We can't say why," JD.com, an investment employee who went to investigate, told Tech Planet.

In addition to investment, BABA is also trying to cut into the field of local life from different paths. In May, word-of-mouth launched "exploding Tuan", which integrates services such as local online celebrity restaurants, popular styles, special offers and time-limited purchase of 0 yuan meals. It is embedded in Alipay App in the form of Mini Program. Word-of-mouth App and ele.me App will have related activity pages, and some users can see the entrance of the exploding group on the front page of Alipay.

Meituan is the absolute leader in the field of local life, with more than 200 billion GMV arrivals in 2019. But this does not prevent potential competitors from boldly challenging existing behemoths.

Tech Planet has exclusively reported on DiDi Global Inc. 's internal testing of "Today's Fashion style" e-commerce, as well as cooperation with ele.me in local life and other cross-border businesses. A person close to DiDi Global Inc. told Tech that DiDi Global Inc. had been studying takeout, pre-products, tickets, tourism and even Hainan duty-free shops before the accident.

Prior to this, DiDi Global Inc. 's competitor Uber has successfully built the takeout business into its second growth curve, while DiDi Global Inc. 's revenue is still highly dependent on the ride-hailing business.

Internet platforms aggregate more than 100 million traffic, and they all want traffic to bring greater value. In the second half of last year, Hello launched a number of new local life services, such as group buying at the store, Hello Hotel, Hello Taxi and so on.

On April 15, 2021, Hello lived officially in Kaesong, Shanghai, and then launched various food and beverage-based group-buying packages in Zhuhai, Shenyang and Guangzhou. Users can place orders directly in the Hello Travel App or the official account of Hello Life.

Tech Planet learned from Hello insiders that the project has been greatly scaled back to focus more on Shanghai, the headquarters of Hello Travel.

Other players are bound to appear in the field of local life, which is caused by the law of market competition. Byte beat and Kuaishou Technology are well aware of this law, so when the short video traffic peaked, they launched their local life business one after another.

More people are concerned about whether Douyin and Kuaishou Technology can break through Meituan's blockade and subvert the existing competition pattern.

Instead, the richest opponent is draining Meituan.

Douyin, which is owned by Byte Jump, is seen as its strongest competitor, with a steady stream of flow and cash.

After the second half of 2019, the focus of Douyin's local life shifted from transactions to content production at the end.

A person close to Douyin told Tech that Douyin's local life business was initially piloted in five cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhengzhou, using the BD+ operation model, similar to the direct operation model of local life. Becton Dickinson & Co is in charge of the former SMB (small and medium-sized customers in the business sector), but this model has not been successful.

Douyin is a content production platform, it also wants merchants to produce their own content to win customers, and restaurant merchants are reluctant to produce video content out of their own pocket because of their extremely low profits.

"the threshold for Douyin operation is still too high for local merchants. E-commerce can start because profits can support brands, and local life cannot afford it, so service providers can't do it ecologically. Businesses operate on their own, and in the end, only a very small number of businesses can play. "an ele.me person analyzed.

Douyin is currently vigorously recruiting service providers to produce content for local life merchants, according to the person familiar with the matter. At the same time, Douyin provides subsidies to service providers.

In order to attract customers, catering merchants often offer discount services. According to Tech Planet, Douyin does not provide subsidies to merchants, and accordingly, it does not take a cut from merchants at present.

From Jinri Toutiao to Douyin, from picture and text to video, byte jump has created two content products with huge traffic, but behind them is more like a set of logic: information flow, algorithm advantage. But local life is completely unfamiliar to Douyin, and it needs to establish a whole new model.

First of all, it is necessary to solve the retention problem of merchants.

After Douyin launched group buying, Meituan did a lot of analysis and research. At first, Meituan felt that Douyin group buying was a big threat, but Meituan gradually realized that all restaurants that became popular on Douyin were often only popular for a short period of time, and in the end, the restaurant's data on Meituan and Dianping were better than before, that is to say, Douyin group buying finally only drained Meituan.

A Meituan insider explained that this is actually in line with the characteristics of the catering industry. Users seldom go to a restaurant all the time, but eat in a different way, which determines that catering businesses can only be popular for a while.

Secondly, content recommendation helps to improve the efficiency of user selection, but it is difficult to create the demand for low-frequency trading.

"the timing of low-frequency trading (especially wine travel and integrated business) may be out of touch with the previous content recommendation link. Food and beverage is relatively easy, because the transaction and content recommendation time can be very close. Meituan, who arrived at the store, explained, "most of the trips are planned, so it's hard to leave right away."

But catering merchants, which are easier to cut into, are reluctant to produce their own content, but Douyin can't subsidize it all the time.

A local resident of Douyin said that their main task now is to provide user retention rates.

According to later LatePost, byte beat local life business aims to achieve a total transaction volume of group purchases (GMV) of 20 billion yuan by the end of 2021 by February this year. People familiar with the matter say the figure of 20 billion has been revised later.

A source familiar with the matter told Tech that Douyin's latest goal is to win 6 billion GMV in a combination of catering, wine travel and store arrival. This goal has shrunk significantly compared with the original 20 billion.

Byte "take all" in all fields?

For now, Douyin doesn't seem to pose a threat to Meituan's main business.

Meituan, a person who came to the store, said, "our annual GMV goal of going to the restaurant alone is almost close to 100 billion, while the 6 billion goal of Douyin is less than 1/10 of the total." "

But Meituan is already blocking Douyin. "our task now is to get the merchants to level the price of the package, and at the same time, in order to make up for the merchants, we will provide them with some advertising rebates," the Meituan visitor told Tech Planet.

In his view, Douyin's entry into local life in the short term may improve the level of online catering. However, Douyin takeout is similar to the situation when Tencent did Tesco, and it is not omnipotent to have traffic.

Meituan's efforts are not just about leveling prices. Dianping, as the main battlefield of group buying, is also further narrowing the gap between transactions and content, it is beginning to become more like a little red book: dual-column, video, leading merchants to learn digital marketing. Compared with Douyin, this is precisely the deficiency of Meituan. However, Meituan's advantage is the ability to manage merchants, which Douyin can't match in a short time.

In the trillions of tracks of local life, every company wants a piece of the pie. At the same time, while the growth of the main business has peaked, Internet companies must "invade" other people's hinterland to create new records.

Unlike hard technology such as car building and chip research and development, players such as Douyin, Kuaishou Technology and DiDi Global Inc. do not need much investment to enter this field, and can always rely on their own traffic advantages to gain a small portion of the market share, but whether they can eventually become bigger or not is still unknown. The examples of DiDi Global Inc. 's entry into takeout and Meituan's involvement in taxi hailing have shown that Internet giants are not able to take all winners in all fields.

In addition, from the perspective of investment, Douyin is still in the exploratory stage and has not made efforts on a large scale. From easy money to more difficult money, Douyin may also need to assess whether this is a cost-effective business in the end.