Meituan launches global delivery platform

Chinese e-commerce platform Meituan has officially launched its “Meituan Delivery” global-delivery platform in order to extend service to more industries and more customers.

Meituan Delivery will open its technology platform, delivery network and value chains to ecosystem partners, enabling them to improve operating efficiency, reduce logistics cost and drive the growth of the real economy.

“Meituan will open its delivery network to more customers and extend the network to various industries,” said Meituan senior VP and president of the company’s at-home business group Wang Puzhong. “The extension and opening of Meituan’s delivery network will help establish a more flexible delivery platform by customizing services for different industries, upgrading our delivery dispatch system, and improving delivery infrastructure.”

Meituan’s global on-demand delivery platform is serving more than 3.6 million merchants and 400 million consumers nationwide, covering more than 2800 cities and counties with nearly 10,000 delivery stations and warehouses and more than 600,000 daily active riders. Meituan’s daily food delivery orders exceeded 25 million on April 20.

“With the opening of our delivery platform, Meituan will leverage our delivery resources to better fulfill diversified needs of users and merchants, while integrating delivery resources to improve the overall urban logistics efficiency,” said Meituan Delivery GM Wei Wei.

Meituan started to build its own delivery network in 2015 and launched its Premium Delivery service to meet the surging needs for efficient on-demand food delivery. In 2016, Speedy Delivery service was introduced to diversify its delivery services. Meituan launched its first autonomous delivery vehicle “Xiaodai” in 2018.

Meituan’s delivery platform relies on its “Super Brain” – the real-time intelligent dispatch system that enables Meituan to complete a delivery within 30 minutes on average. The dispatch system can perform about 2.9 billion route planning algorithm operations per hour during daily peak times, and calculate optimized delivery routes in an average of 0.55 milliseconds, according to Sun Zhizhao, CTO of Meituan Delivery.

In addition, Meituan has developed four delivery models – point-to-point shuttle delivery, galaxy network delivery, integrated warehouse inventory delivery, and smart terminal delivery – to serve convenience stores, super markets, retail stores, and office buildings, which can meet the different needs of merchants, improve delivery efficiency and reduce logistics costs.