The ongoing takeout battle is reshaping a new Meituan.
This transformation is driven by a combination of gains and losses.
01 Loss: Fading Faith
What has the takeout battle cost Meituan? Currently, it’s not just the net loss of CNY 23.35 billion in the 2025 financial report; more profoundly, it is the fading narrative of a ‘myth’.
In the internet field, Meituan emerged from the group buy war and grew into a local living giant. Meituan and its founder Wang Xing have long been elevated to ‘mythical’ status. Wang Xing’s rationality and strategic thought, along with Meituan’s organizational resilience and takeout moat, became the ‘faith’ investors relied upon.
No wonder. Meituan’s growth has always been tied to fierce competition, able to establish barriers with scale, efficiency, and execution in high-intensity competition sectors.
The capital market voted with real money for its combat effectiveness. When it went public in 2018, Meituan was valued at over $50 billion, second only to BAT. Subsequently, more and more people became fans of ‘Brother Xing’.
The first sign of lost faith in Meituan was tied to Douyin. On December 19, 2023, reports emerged that Douyin intended to enter the takeout space and was negotiating with Alibaba to acquire Ele.me, causing Meituan’s stock to drop over 8% at one point.
After several attempts, Douyin ultimately gave up on takeout, further endorsing Meituan’s invulnerability. However, in 2025, the entrance of JD and Alibaba shattered this consensus. In Q3 of 2025, Meituan turned from profit to loss, while its takeout delivery efficiency was partially caught up, and its market share was eroded.
According to Caixin reports, the previous 70:30 market share ratio between Meituan and Ele.me shifted in 2025 to fluctuating shares of 55%-58%, 35%-37%, and 5%-8% for Meituan, Taobao Flash Purchase, and JD Takeout, respectively.
The day before the financial report was released, an article titled ‘The Takeout War Should End’ in the Economic Daily was interpreted by the market as a ‘ceasefire’ signal, leading Meituan’s stock to rise over 13% in a single day.
This not only represents a revaluation of market confidence in Meituan but also reveals a somewhat painful fact: the takeout war has completely torn apart Meituan’s previously perceived impenetrable moat.
A company, no matter how strong its organizational ability, cannot withstand the low threshold of business models. Even if subsidies diminish and profits recover in the future, Meituan’s valuation logic is unlikely to revert to its former state in the short term.
Because Meituan’s fate is now increasingly dependent on external variables such as the investment resolve of competitors and regulatory attitudes. The capital market is highly sensitive to external movements, reflected in stock prices with sharp increases or decreases.
During this phase, the internal dynamics and business evolution within Meituan have paradoxically been weakened. In fact, recently, Wang Xing has started instructing internally not to refer to him as ‘Brother Xing’, but simply as Wang Xing.
‘Brother Xing’ becoming Wang Xing is not just about breaking down hierarchical structures within organizational culture; it also reflects Wang Xing’s initiative to cut ties with external ‘myth-making’ after losing market competitive initiative.
This awakening, in some ways, may be beneficial for Meituan, but it spells trouble for those secondary market investors who elevated their stakes based on faith at the beginning of 2025.
02 Gains: Resilience Evolution
Setting aside social perceptions, one commendable aspect of Meituan from a business standpoint is that, even when besieged, it has consistently stood on the opposite side of panic, maintaining strategic clarity and a methodical approach. Of course, excluding AI.
The results show that Meituan not only withstood a whole year of intense ‘stress tests’ but also achieved innovation and evolution on the business front.
According to Caixin reports, despite profit pressures, Meituan retained over 60% market share of takeout GTV, facing far lower losses compared to competitors, with a significant advantage in the market for mid to high priced meals.
The reasons for this achievement are not solely based on follow-up subsidies, but more so on continuous business innovation and efficiency upgrades.
When Douyin’s impact extended to in-store businesses, Meituan launched ‘Pin Good Rice’—with unit prices as low as CNY 10-15—leveraging group orders and centralized delivery to penetrate extreme price sensitivity among users.
▲ In July 2020, Meituan quietly piloted the Pin Good Rice business in Wuhu, Anhui.
During last year’s takeout battle, the ‘Brand Satellite Store’ also played a crucial role. Brand satellite stores serve a function similar to ‘front warehouses’ in retail: Meituan provides data and site selection support, allowing small stores to cover locations that larger chain restaurants cannot reach, quickly expanding the reach of their audience.
In light of tightening consumption trends, this business model has helped chain restaurants deepen price reductions, rapidly innovate, and grow revenue, while significantly tightening the platform’s control over quality supply.
This represents a structural advantage that pure subsidy investments cannot easily replicate, and is a deeper reason why Meituan can maintain far lower losses compared to its rivals.
Public information shows that by the end of 2025, Meituan had partnered with over 1,000 brands to establish more than 10,000 satellite stores, with Haidilao’s ‘Xiaofan Hotpot’ brand alone having opened over 1,400 locations.
In terms of delivery efficiency, we note that Meituan is reinforcing quicker and more accurate services. Taobao Flash Purchase and JD Takeout both have a 15-minute estimated delivery time window, while Meituan not only can pinpoint down to the minute but also offers a 5-minute advance delivery option for users.
At the financial report meeting, Wang Xing summarized this as ‘fast and reliable delivery’, calling it Meituan Takeout’s core advantage.
While these may seem like product function iterations, they are actually results supported by over a decade of rider network density, extensive order data, and AI scheduling algorithms.
In the field of instant retail, Meituan has also increased supply and operational efficiency through ‘Lightning Warehouses’, self-owned brand ‘Xiaoxiang Supermarket’, and micro-warehouses, alongside launching the ‘Safe Flash Purchase’ program in partnership with major brands to enhance service guarantees and accelerate market penetration and ecosystem solidification.
Faced with the harsh reality of low market entry barriers and intensifying competition, Meituan is increasingly relying on innovation to solve problems.
As we judged back in the early years: Meituan has no propensity to ‘win by default’. It remains relatively stable, but earning in the future will require more effort.
03 A New Meituan
In the short term, as the subsidy war cools and average losses continue to narrow, the direction of Meituan’s profitability recovery in 2026 has become relatively clear. However, it still faces triad pressure—
While ending the takeout war is possible, defining what constitutes excessive competition or what may be normal marketing subsidies is not easy; currently, Alibaba’s stance on instant retail remains critical: in-store businesses still face strong attacks from Douyin’s lifestyle services; international expansion is fraught with challenges—Middle East turmoil, and in Brazil, Didi is also on high alert…
▲ Didi’s local ride-hailing platform 99 in Brazil has spawned a takeout platform called 99Food.
Amidst fierce battles, a new Meituan that focuses on instant retail and self-operated retail is beginning to take shape.
Even without the intrusions of JD and Alibaba, the growth of Meituan’s takeout market has long entered a phase of slower growth. In contrast, the growth certainty of instant retail and self-operated retail is much stronger.
From a business perspective, the takeout battle has accelerated Meituan’s investment pace in instant retail and ‘Xiaoxiang Supermarket’. Recent actions, such as quickly expanding its warehouses and establishing offline supermarkets, or Meituan’s sudden entry into negotiations with Dingdong Maicai, reflect its latest strategic intent.
Under a more focused strategic direction, Meituan’s initial boundary-less innovations and subsequent bold investments in new businesses like Meituan Grocery, and Meituan Preferred may be hard to replicate in the short term.
Currently, as Meituan seeks more certain growth, a significant variable remains AI.
In the 2025 financial call, Wang Xing noted that while general-purpose AI can chat, it cannot reliably manage real-world service experiences; the merchant POI data, dynamic operational data, and genuine user evaluations accumulated by Meituan over the last decade are precisely the most precious feed for a ‘local service AI’.
However, from the product experience standpoint, whether it’s ‘Xiaotuan’ or the standalone app ‘Xiaomei’, AI’s true role has only been initiated at the order decision level. The AI upgrades in delivery fulfillment and the intelligent feedback of evaluation data have yet to form a visible closed-loop advantage.
▲ The home pages of ‘Xiaotuan’ and ‘Xiaomei’.
Compared to Alibaba’s general-purpose AI assistant Qianwen, the differences in Meituan AI are not apparent, and its presence and volume are significantly lower.
While the future impact of AI on the physical world remains uncertain, one thing is clear: technological variables influenced by strategic thinking and organizational resilience depend solely on how Wang Xing leads Meituan to triumph once more.