Meituan's food delivery option, established in 2013, has become central to its revenue stream with the pandemic accelerating demand for food delivery adoption. Widely used, the service has emerged as a key driver of user engagement on the platform, pushing traffic to other offerings such as hotel and travel bookings. Meituan is the largest food delivery platform in China, holding a majority share of over 65% in the Chinese food delivery business, with its main competitor, Ele.me holding less than 30%.
Meituan is in the on-demand retail service industry with its organization and logistics, as well as its supply and delivery chain infrastructure network to enable a guaranteed delivery system. This network consists of 2,800 counties and cities in China, and more than 1 million daily active delivery drivers and 5.27 million delivery drivers earning on Meituan in 2021. Within their on demand services, Meituan has several programs that provide different services, ranging from instant delivery to next day delivery, depending on the tier of city.
Meituan Instashopping Service - This provides small and medium-sized businesses the ability to digitize and offer its products through instant delivery and/or next day delivery. Order volume has increased by 40% year over year, active merchants are increasing by 30% year over year, partnering with over 400 brands and offering services in over 200 cities in China. Consumers can order flowers, medicine, and various items from local supermarkets and convenience stores. This is offered in up to tier three cities.
Meituan Grocery (“美團買菜”) - Now upgraded to Xiaoxiang Supermarket (“小象超市”), which marks the official transition from grocery to online supermarket in 2023, where users can get instant/fresh products such as fresh produce and pharmaceuticals/medicine though instant delivery. The supply chain for Meituan grocery operates in Tier 1 cities.
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Meituan Select (“美團優選”) - Provides next day delivery for non-immediate demand products such as appliances, apparel, necessities, operating in lower-tier markets. Launched in 2020 in China during the COVID-19 pandemic, the online platform uses a bulk purchasing model grouping orders and enabling cost savings for customers. By the beginning of 2021, Meituan Select covered more than 20 provinces using Meituan's well-established logistics network to optimize delivery and efficiency. Meituan-Select worked as an "next-day supermarket," delivering products to designated pick-up spots, such as local shops, where customers could collect their orders.
The platform's commercialization model, offering discounts, and bulk purchasing allowed it to generate significant GMV, placing the company ahead of its competitors such as Duo Duo Grocery (Pinduoduo), and Taocaicai (Alibaba). However, the company faced many different obstacles like government regulations, aggressive competitions, and financial losses. Regulation from the government in 2021 made Meituan pay fines for predatory pricing and false advertising.
In response to these challenges, Meituan reorganized its operations and adopted cost-cutting strategies. That made Meituan shift its strategy to improving supply chain efficiency and profitability by achieving positive margins by 2023.
Hotel and travel services
Meituan entered the hotel and travel services space in 2015. Since then, it has expanded partnerships with over 900 hotel chains. Recent boosts in tourism have also helped to expand the business segment with a year over year (YoY) booking increase of 120%. More recently Meituan has increased its offerings to include coupon and package deals. Their broad network allows them to adapt to consumer preferences and trends for brand awareness. Meituan also leverages its data analytics to provide smaller and medium-sized hotel merchants with tools to drive traffic, improve room renovation solutions, and expand their marketing strategies. Recent developments include a recent partnership with Agoda, an online travel agency, to better cater to Chinese tourists traveling abroad and enhance services for overseas travel. Similar to recent developments by Pinduoduo with its Duo Duo live, Meituan's expansion into the livestream model has also helped merchants engage with users to promote destinations through virtual tours.
Bike sharing and e-bike sharing
Meituan acquired Mobike in April 2017 for US$2.7 billion. Meituan is responsible for production, operation, and disposal of these bikes and e-mopeds.
Artificial intelligence
Meituan entered the artificial intelligence sector in 2023 by acquiring the AI startup Light Year for US$281 million. In September 2025, the company released its first open-source large language model, LongCat-Flash-Chat. Subsequent releases include LongCat-Flash-Thinking, featuring Chain-of-thought capabilities; LongCat-Flash-Omni, a multimodal model; and LongCat-Flash-Lite, a fast, low-cost Mixture of Experts model. In October 2025, Meituan released LongCat-Video, a model optimized for efficient long-video generation. This was followed, in December 2025, by LongCat-Image, a small 6 billion parameter image generation model that emphasized data quality over the number of parameters.
In June 2026, Meituan released LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter model trained on 50,000 Chinese microchips, under the MIT License. Meituan did not disclose the chips' manufacturer, but stated in a WeChat post that it had used a software library from Huawei for inter-chip communication, and noted that it needed to compensate for the domestic chips' lower memory capacity and less mature software ecosystem compared to Nvidia's H800 GPUs. Prior to launch, the company had made a pre-release version of LongCat-2.0 available under the name "Owl Alpha" on the OpenRouter inference service.
Meituan has applied its AI technology to its core food and hotel businesses through Xiaomei. Xiaomei is an AI agent, powered by Meituan's LongCat models, that assists customers with food delivery purchases and hotel bookings.
Other services
Meituan also offers many other services and smaller initiatives, such as a business-to-business food distribution service (快驴), power-bank-sharing, micro-lending, and a restaurant management system (RMS) initiative.
Unmanned aerial vehicles
In 2023, Meituan began using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for urban logistics deliveries. The UAVs have a maximum delivery distance of five kilometers and can operate in inclement weather. In May 2023, Meituan and Pony.ai announced a partnership in which Meituan would license the company's technology to support the expansion its UAV delivery services in China's first-tier cities.
Self driving delivery vehicles
Meituan introduced self-driving vehicles in 2021, focusing on expanding into densely populated cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen. Through a partnership with Li Auto Inc. Meituan leverages the company's intellectual property to advance its autonomous vehicle development. The IP license includes Li Auto's SEV model's complete vehicle design plan, molds, and tooling.
