Description
Meituan formerly Meituan-Dianping, is a Chinese shopping platform for locally found consumer products and retail services including entertainment, dining, delivery, travel and other services. The company is headquartered in Beijing and was founded in 2010 by Wang Xing. The company operates different apps and websites for different services. The Meituan site offers deals of the day by selling vouchers on local services and entertainment. By May 2014, the company had 5,000 employees. In 2015, Meituan merged with Dazhong Dianping and changed its name to "Meituan-Dianping". dianping.com hosts consumer reviews of restaurants, similar to Yelp and TripAdvisor, and also offers group buying similar to Groupon. Meituan-Dianping is one of the world's largest online and on-demand delivery platforms. It has over 290 million monthly active users and 600 million registered users as of April 2018.
History
Piloted in Shanghai and Beijing, Meituan had rapidly expanded to second-tier and third-tier cities, totalling 200 million users in 2015. Meituan.com became a dominating company in China after a rapid consolidation of the deal-of-the-day companies. Earlier estimates show that there were 2000 voucher selling companies in the mid 2000s and due to intense competition in the industry only a few have emerged as dominant players. In 2014 it accounted for 60% of the market share of deal-of-the-day group-buying websites in China. The company received initial funding of $12 million from Sequoia Capital. In May 2014, global growth equity firm General Atlantic led a $300 million series C funding round with two other investors. On 8 October 2015, Meituan and Dianping, a Chinese group buying site, became one company. On 19 January 2016, Meituan Dianping announced that it has raised more than $3.3 billion. On September 20, 2018 Meituan Dianping debuted on the Hong Kong stock exchange at an IPO price of HK$69 per share.
The company was renamed from "Meituan Dianping" to Meituan with effect from September 30, 2020.
