In the second half of the takeaway, Ele.me and Meituan had a new change.
According to the latest data released by QuestMobile, Ele.me's MAU (monthly active users) in October surpassed Meituan Waimai. According to media reports, this is Ele.me for the first time in the past two years that monthly active users are higher than Meituan Waimai on the APP side.
01
Yuehuo overtakes Meituan, are you hungry, what did you do right?
In the past two years, the food delivery industry has formed a situation where Ele.me and Meituan are competing with the two strongest. Meituan has always had the upper hand in terms of market share and monthly activity. This time, Ele.me surpassed Meituan in monthly active users, giving the industry a new understanding of the competitive situation in the take-out market. It turns out that Meituan has not established an absolute advantage in the take-out market.
Although the monthly advantage of an app does not explain much, the market impact it brings is profound. Are you hungry? The overtake of Meituan among monthly active users makes people wonder, what did he do right? Are you hungry in the future, will you fully catch up with Meituan?
Before answering these two questions, let's take a look at some market initiatives of Ele.me this year.
In March 2020, Ele.me started to expand to 100 third- and fourth-tier cities; in May 2020, Ele.me announced that it would build a "digital street" in 200 key cities across the country; in July 2020, Ele.me Announcing a comprehensive upgrade, from a food delivery platform to a life service platform that addresses all the immediate needs of users. The upgrade covers four aspects: from food delivery to providing full-service life in the same city, personalized recommendation, content-based interaction, and membership system upgrade In August 2020, Ele.me launched the 10 billion subsidy program. The first phase will be launched in 24 cities including Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, and Nanjing. Three consecutive upgrades in a month, the scope of subsidies has expanded from catering to life services and other categories. The subsidized cities have expanded from 24 cities to nearly 130 cities.
In addition to the above measures, Ele.me also seized the huge potential of Ali's ecology. After joining Ali, Ele.me has been working hard to integrate into the Ali ecosystem. At present, Ele.me has not only completed integration with the Ali ecosystem in terms of users and traffic, but also its product technology and other infrastructures are also on Aliyun. This year’s Double Eleven, Ele, who has gone through the period of integration with Alibaba, began to leverage the potential of cooperative brands (such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, Budweiser, etc.), and the potential of Ali’s ecology (Taobao, Alipay, AutoNavi, etc.), Launched a counterattack against Meituan. Ele.me data shows that from November 1st to November 11th, KFC, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Wallace, the four catering brands have successfully exceeded the 100 million yuan mark in transaction volume, and the number of catering "100 million clubs" directly Doubled. During the entire Double 11 period, the average daily orders for Ele.me card and coupon verification increased by 85% from the previous month. On November 1, the average daily order for card verification and verification increased by 6 times. This Double 11 is also the most full participation of catering businesses in the past.
When Ele.me launched the "Ten Billion Subsidy", Brother Xi once said that the implementation of the "Ten Billion Subsidy" strategy has at least the following effects. The first role is to enhance Ele.me’s competitiveness in the C-end market. The second role is to help Ele.me to fight for more business resources and help businesses digitize. The third role is to check the local life service market and promote Ele.me and Ali Eco are synergistically integrated in the local life service market. In a word, "Ten billion subsidies" is a good move to start the Meituan counterattack.
Looking at it now, several major initiatives launched by Ele.me in the first half of the year have achieved obvious results. It is the combination of these measures that helped Ele.me introduce new user increments, increase user stickiness, and help Eleme to overtake Meituan Takeaway Monthly in October.
02
What happened to Meituan Takeaway?
When we were talking about being hungry and doing something right, we couldn’t help asking, what happened to Meituan Takeaway? To answer this question, we have to look at what Meituan has done this year.
In the first half of 2020, affected by the epidemic, the days of dining and takeaway were very difficult. Under the epidemic situation, Meituan began to increase its support for Meituan flash sale, Meituan grocery shopping, and motorcycles. Want to accelerate the development of new business while reducing the loss of food delivery.
According to media reports, Meituan began investigating the nationwide community group buying market at the beginning of this year, and after careful preparation, it began to invest heavily. It is understood that Meituan has offered more price tags than competitors to expand its local staff in Jinan. The competitor’s reward is 130 yuan for each leader, and Meituan gives 160 yuan. From July 7 to October, Meituan’s community group buying business "Meituan Optimal" expanded to 20 cities within 3 months, and the team expanded to more than 3,000 members.
According to a report from Sina Finance, Wang Xing conveyed his determination to expand and strengthen the "community group buying" business in the company's middle and high-level meetings more than once, and said that "this battle must be won."
Regarding "community group buying", Xi Ge also said before: For Meituan, which uses high-frequency and low-frequency, the high-frequency consumer market such as grocery shopping must be captured. Seizing the high-frequency consumer market of buying food will seize the next wave of consumer trends for users. Therefore, grocery shopping is the key to enhancing the future competitiveness of Meituan Food+Platform strategy. Conversely, once Meituan misses the high-frequency consumer market of grocery shopping, it may have a huge impact on its future development. The same instant delivery, the same food as the core, the same high-frequency consumption, users can buy food and order takeaway. If there really is a big grocery shopping giant, it would be a disaster for Meituan.
It is foreseeable that Meituan will invest more resources in "community group buying" in the future.
In addition to "community group buying", Meituan also increased its investment in shared motorcycles this year. According to various media reports, Meituan placed orders for more than one million shared motorcycles to Fujitec and Xinri in April and also developed the motorcycle business. It is understood that the average cost of a shared motorcycle is about 3,000 yuan (including positioning system and battery). Based on this calculation, the cost of ordering one million motorcycles by Meituan may reach several billion yuan.
In the first half of the year, in addition to flash sales, grocery shopping, and motorcycles, Meituan also invested in the field of travel and supply chain.
All in all, Meituan’s status this year can be described as multi-line combat, facing multiple pincers from Pinduoduo, Didi, and Ele.me.
Resources are always limited. If there is more consumption here, there will naturally be less input. So we can see that when Ele.me is subsidizing tens of billions and launching double eleven attacks, Meituan's response is slightly weak.
03
In the second half of the takeaway, Meituan must face up to the pressure from Ele.me
At present, the food delivery market is undergoing profound changes. From the development model of relying solely on traffic dividends in the past, it has begun to enter a brand-new "second half" featuring digital upgrades. Especially after experiencing the baptism of the epidemic, the advent of the era of new infrastructure has put forward higher requirements for online and intelligent life services, and the pace of digital transformation and upgrading of the entire industrial economy is accelerating.
In the second half of the takeaway, it is difficult for the platform to repeat the past one-time discounts or discounts that relied on "burning money" to harvest traffic. Instead, it must have long-term strategic endurance and attract users with high-quality experiences day after day. In the new "second half", the ecological battle has also become the commanding heights of the industry. At this stage, it is no longer possible to rely on a single platform to complete the construction of an ecological closed-loop as in the past. Instead, it must rely on a wide range of cross-terminals with complete categories. Matrix advantage can achieve the goal.
In a word, in the second half of takeaway, endurance, ecology, supply chain, service and experience are the key elements of platform competition. Platforms must enhance their competitiveness in multiple dimensions to win in future competition. Otherwise, you may encounter Waterloo.
Since getting through with the Alibaba ecosystem, Ele.me has made progress in technology, marketing, and management capabilities. Correspondingly, Ele.me has been strengthened in endurance, ecology, supply chain, service and experience. It can be said that the current hungry, has already gathered momentum, and began to launch a general offensive. Taking this Double Eleven as an example, we saw that Ele.me was integrated into the Alipay platform and appeared on the revised Alipay homepage. Ele.me’s reputation exceeded 1 million offline merchants for the first time to open a store on Tmall. In addition, Ele.me also has increasingly abundant chemical reactions with Ali's ecological businesses such as Taobao, AutoNavi, and Hema. Such ecological synergy effects are all carried out under the matrix cooperation of multiple APP platforms and multiple vertical fields.
Are you hungry under Ali's ecological blessing? No matter in terms of combat power or resources, it is different.
On the other hand, Meituan Takeaway, due to the impact of multi-line operations, both resources and energy are somewhat unable to keep up with the pace of competitors.
As mentioned above, the second half of takeaway is a comprehensive competition of key elements such as endurance, ecology, supply chain, service and experience. The platform must enhance its competitiveness in multiple dimensions to win in the future competition.
"Community group buying" is about the future and very important. Take-out is the foundation, and there is no room for error. How to make a decision? This is not a simple question for Meituan management.