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In recent years, entering the B-side has gradually become an inevitable choice for major Internet companies, and Meituan is naturally unwilling to fall behind.
On April 13, the Meituan Enterprise Edition was officially launched, launching a one-stop enterprise consumption management service for enterprise customers, covering group meals, business travel and other scenarios, and launching the "Enterprise Aviation Plan" to provide free service packages for 11,000 enterprises. Help enterprises customize consumption management solutions. Meituan's ambition to penetrate deeply into the B-side was fully exposed when the enterprise version was launched.
On the C-end, the Meituan platform has formed high-frequency, rigid demand, and high-viscosity consumption characteristics. Meituan’s launch of the enterprise version is undoubtedly to copy its own advantages in eating, drinking, and entertainment to corporate consumer services, trying to take advantage of its natural C-end The moat creates another "Meituan" in the B-end field.
Objectively speaking, the value and potential of the enterprise consumption management market is huge, and there is a strong connection between enterprise consumption services and Meituan’s C-end main business. An important growth driver for the group in the future.
"Enterprise Edition" has a heavy responsibility
Meituan already has a layout on the B side (kuailu purchase, catering system, etc.), but they all provide catering related services for merchants on the platform. It is worth exploring the reasons behind the increasing efforts in the end field.
First, the C-end business has encountered a bottleneck, and Meituan intends to develop the B-end market into the second growth curve. According to financial report data, during the period from 2021 to the first quarter of 2022, the year-on-year growth rate of Meituan’s catering takeaway revenue, number of transactions, and number of transaction users continued to slow down. Looking at the 2022 full-year data, the number of trading users of Meituan has even declined, with a year-on-year decrease of 1.8% to 677 million.
At that time, due to the impact of the epidemic, the performance of the C-end was hit. At this time, Douyin was attacking takeaways, in-store catering and other local life areas to "grab business". There were many potential threats to the development of the C-end from the outside world. Perhaps for the sake of safety, while Meituan is sticking to the C-end country, it also wants to speed up the B-end business to share the overall business risk.
Second, to a certain extent, the development of the B-end can further promote the smooth progress of Meituan's "Deepening Merchant End Support Plan" in the future. According to the current progress, the main direction of the Meituan Enterprise Edition is the corporate catering segment, which undoubtedly provides a dedicated channel for catering merchants to "take large orders", which can more or less help merchants improve operational efficiency and create new products in the post-epidemic era. more income. For Meituan, this is also a good way to reverse the development of the C-end.
Third, the B-end has become the general trend of Internet players, and peers are actively building a To B ecosystem, and it is difficult for Meituan to turn a blind eye to it. The online traffic dividend of the C-end has subsided, and the major Internet overlords are accelerating the development of the B-end, such as Ali, Byte, and Tencent, which have been accelerating the ripening of the B-end business over the past year. Relatively speaking, Meituan has lagged behind in the B-end market One step, it is imperative to choose to develop the enterprise version to help the B-side speed up.
In general, now that all the heroes are entering the market to compete for the local life service market, the development space of the track is becoming more and more crowded. Based on this, Meituan has to rethink how many opportunities can be tapped in this track. For now, the prospect of the B-end is broader and has become a new growth hope for Meituan. The launch of the enterprise version also means that Meituan is truly Stepping into the enterprise consumer service market, the importance of Meituan's enterprise business will continue to rise in the future.
Meituan’s B-side, come prepared
Meituan’s B-side business is not a whim, nor is it blindly following the trend. On the contrary, Meituan’s launch of the enterprise version is an important purpose of its long-term accumulation of capabilities. Relying on the "skills" that have been cultivated for many years in services and products, Meituan obviously has sufficient advantages to deeply cultivate the B-end market.
On the one hand, there are native advantages. Meituan has a very high position in the C-end market, and has strong competitiveness in food and beverage delivery, in-store delivery, and hotel tourism.
The financial report shows that in 2022, the number of active merchants in Meituan's in-store, hotel and tourism businesses will maintain a steady year-on-year growth. As of now, the number of trading users on the Meituan platform has reached 678 million, and the number of riders has reached 6.24 million. These massive merchants, users, and distribution resources can be reused in Meituan’s corporate consumer services. From this point of view, Meituan’s enterprise version of B-side services has a natural business advantage.
On the other hand, there is an experience advantage. The predecessor of Meituan Enterprise Edition was "Shangqitong". It mainly provided travel and catering services for Meituan. It has made great achievements in resource sharing between B and C. In terms of experience, Meituan has accumulated for many years, and has enough confidence to be able to do a good job in the enterprise version of the B-end market.
First, inheriting the previous customer base of Shangqitong, Meituan Enterprise Edition can quickly penetrate into all walks of life. According to the data, as of March, Meituan Enterprise Edition has served nearly 10,000 corporate customers, covering more than 20 industries such as biomedicine, finance and banking, consumer goods, new energy, software and information technology services.
Second, relying on the Unicom sharing between C-end merchant resources and B-end services, the Meituan Enterprise Edition is sufficient to provide full life cycle services for the diversified consumption needs of enterprises.
In this way, on the enterprise consumer side, Meituan not only has a strong supply chain, but also has mature consumption management capabilities and product service capabilities. It may be easy for it to build the enterprise version into a "B-side Meituan".
Good location: Enterprise Edition is a "real demand"
But having said that, on the C side, problems such as group buying and travel can also be solved well, and some companies also have their own fee control management systems. So, is the existence of the enterprise version a real demand or a fake demand? The so-called existence is reasonable, combined with the current corporate consumer market, the answer is undoubtedly more inclined to the former.
First, the strategic concept of corporate customers is in line with the "cost reduction and efficiency improvement" orientation of the Meituan Enterprise Edition. As far as the reality is concerned, after the severe damage of the epidemic, all walks of life pay special attention to the operating rules of increasing efficiency and reducing costs. In this regard, the product concept of Meituan Enterprise Edition coincides with the needs of major enterprises.
According to the official disclosure of Meituan, some customers can save an average of 4.4 hours of reimbursement time for each employee every month after accessing the Meituan Enterprise Edition, and improve the efficiency of corporate financial related processes by 90%. The improvement of efficiency and cost reduction of the Meituan Enterprise Edition is real, and it is close to the operational needs of the enterprise side, and it is easier to win the favor of more enterprises.
Second, pain points in the consumption field of domestic enterprises still exist. According to public information, some enterprise employees still face common pain points such as advance payment, manual posting of tickets, complicated reimbursement process, and large amount of ticket review. The existence of this series of problems is largely due to the lack of a one-stop enterprise consumption management solution for all scenarios.
Let’s look at the “Meituan Enterprise Edition” again, which focuses on “horizontal plus vertical” (horizontal refers to the consumption scenarios of multiple categories such as food, housing, and transportation; vertical refers to the penetration of the entire control rules into all links in the transaction) The integrated approach can accurately solve the management demands of enterprise consumption to a large extent. It can be said that Meituan Enterprise Edition was launched based on market demand, and its presence in the B-end market will not be too low.
As far as the domestic environment is concerned, users' online consumption habits and service systems are relatively mature, and there is a lot of room for more unicorns in the consumption demand of domestic enterprises. According to data from iResearch, in 2020, the scale of expenditures in the five major scenarios of business travel, travel, group meals, procurement, and benefits has reached trillions, and the scale of the enterprise expense management market has reached hundreds of billions.
In addition, the country is still vigorously promoting the digital transformation or upgrading of enterprises, and guiding the transformation of enterprise consumption management to online. The future growth of the enterprise consumption market is expected. The so-called "time creates heroes", the current development atmosphere of the corporate consumer market is good, and the Meituan Enterprise Edition may be just around the corner.
Insufficient time: the latecomers are under great pressure to break through
Although Meituan has many advantages, whether it is the best time to enter the market is another matter. Referring to previous cases, the enterprise version of Ele.me announced a high-profile revision and upgrade in 2020, announced its suspension in 2021, and was included in the Alipay system as a whole. It is hard to say that the former is defending the competition, and the Meituan Enterprise Edition, which is coming slowly, may be under a lot of pressure.
First of all, Meituan is not the only company keenly aware of the corporate consumer market. There has been a traditional group meal model represented by Qianxihe for a long time, connecting hospitals, government agencies, enterprises and other groups; later, there are corporate services from Didi and Ctrip, which solve the pain points of corporate travel expenses and complicated reimbursement process.
Compared with the same period last year, I have to admit that the Meituan Enterprise Edition came a bit late. For B-end enterprises, the cost of management system conversion is high, and they will not transfer from the existing platform to another platform unless necessary. In this regard, the Meituan Enterprise Edition has no opportunity to enter the market, and will attract more customers in the later stage It might take a lot of thought.
Secondly, the development of Meituan Enterprise Edition is still constrained. On the one hand, there are many restrictive factors for the group meal industry to become popular. Insufficient dish innovation ability, backward supply chain management system, and weak awareness of brand development are still obstacles in the way for the group meal business to move forward.
On the other hand, the impact of short video platforms on its group buying business continues. Although Meituan officials still stated that the impact of the short video platform on Meituan’s business is limited, this “limited” time frame is still unknown. What is certain is that as the expansion of short video players in the local life field continues to accelerate, the impact on Meituan will continue.
Although the enterprise consumer service market is booming, and Meituan’s enterprise version of the B-end service itself has natural advantages, there is no shortage of excellent enterprise consumer service providers at home and abroad. Can the Meituan Enterprise Edition be the first in the B-end market? To, gain a firm foothold, it will take time to consider.