Pinduoduo is still struggling, why is Meituan not aggressive?

In the year since its listing, Meituan’s stock price has experienced a break and continued decline; it did not start to rise until June 2019. After the second quarter performance exceeded expectations, Meituan’s performance on the Hang Seng Index was green. Despite the situation, it rose against the trend and hit a new high market value of HK$441.4 billion (approximately US$56.4 billion) since its listing. As of press time, Meituan’s share price is trading at HK$75, with a market value of HK$411.8 billion.

What is intriguing is that compared with the listed stock price, Meituan’s market value after one year has not changed much, but the queue of Internet giants is completely different.

At the end of August, Pinduoduo surpassed Baidu’s market value by US$2.5 billion, which is still US$800 million higher than Baidu. Among listed Internet companies, the top three by market value are Alibaba, Tencent and Meituan. JD.com, Pinduoduo and Baidu rank fourth, fifth and sixth respectively. BAT and TMD have all been reshuffled.

The current Meituan is still facing enemies from all sides, but compared with itself a year ago, Meituan has tempered its edge. The first is Meituan’s core food delivery business. The war with Ele.me has changed from an overt and covert fight in the past to an “underground battle” now. On the surface, Meituan does not respond to Ele.me’s fierce attack, but it will fight back in a more secret dimension.

One manifestation is that Meituan no longer endlessly follows up on Ele.me’s subsidy war between users and riders. Meituan CEO Wang Xing said in the Q1 financial report that this subsidy method is unsustainable. Once the market When the event ends, the order will disappear. Previously, a senior Meituan executive told 36Kr that both parties would be able to make profits immediately as long as they stopped subsidizing, but if Ele.me did not subsidize, the market share would go back.

Since the second half of 2018, Meituan has relied on the membership system to attract new users, promote activity and improve user retention. This system is almost the same as the Ele.me super membership system. The difference is that Ele.me itself relies on the huge Alibaba system and can obtain a large number of order conversions by relying on 88 members; Meituan members are more seeking cooperation outside the group, such as 2019 In Q2 this year, Meituan launched a joint monthly membership card with Tencent Video to enrich member benefits. Meituan said it will explore more cooperation opportunities with ecosystem partners in the future. This measure is reflected in official data. The average purchasing frequency of Meituan monthly active members is more than three times that of ordinary monthly active users; the average ordering frequency of Ele.me super members is 2.3 times that of ordinary users.