The two major platforms of Meituan and Ele.me can be said to be the "giants" of mainland Internet takeaway, although the two together seize about 90% of the share of the takeaway market, they are also competing with each other. It's just that in recent years, what we have seen is basically that the US group is in the position of "strong".
It can be seen from the data that in Alibaba's fiscal year 2022 report, the revenue of local life services business was 8.757 billion yuan in the first quarter and 9.513 billion yuan in the second quarter, respectively, while the revenue of Meituan's takeaway business in the first two quarters of 2021 reached 20.6 billion yuan and 23.1 billion, which is strong and which is weak at a glance.
Moreover, at the beginning of January 2022, there were even rumors that Hungry Mo would "make a big layoff". Although Ele.me came forward to deny this rumor, it is a fact that Ele.me's performance growth rate has gradually slowed down, and the market has speculated that Ele.me may not be able to "beat" the US group.
However, who can know that the "weak" side is hungry, in fact, it is the founding father of the mainland Internet takeaway industry.
The originator of Internet takeaway - hungry
Before about 2009, the form of mainland catering takeaway was telephone ordering, and the delivery efficiency was far from what it is today. Therefore, Zhang Xuhao, who was already studying for a master's degree at Shanghai Jiao Tong University at that time, co-founded an online ordering platform with several classmates, which was the original Hungry.
For the market at that time, the Internet was still a fresh thing, and the Internet takeaway that was born at once was even more novel. Therefore, this entrepreneurial project with no money and no resources suddenly caught fire, and attracted capital to inject millions of dollars of start-up capital into it.
Therefore, Hungry Began to exert efforts from Shanghai to the whole country. By 2017, the Ele.me platform had covered more than 2,000 cities, with 260 million users and more than 15,000 employees. In Zhang Xuhao's own words, Hungry has become a "super unicorn."
However, during the period of the continuous rise of Ele.me, many people have seen the popularity of this market and have come in to want a share of the pie, and many platforms that we may not have heard of have appeared, such as Easy Tao, Order Me, Line Zero and so on. However, these platforms eventually almost became "cannon fodder", and the only successful share of the cake was the METUAN, which was established in 2011.
Although Hungry Was founded at the earliest and expanded rapidly, it still did not "defeat" the US group. From a market point of view, this may be the young entrepreneur Zhang Xuhao's "loss" to Wang Xing, who has been successful in entrepreneurship for many times.
Sell Hungry, cash out 66.5 billion
At that time, under the competition of the US group, the performance of Hungry Did Decline, and Zhang Xuhao may have felt some difficulty, so he made a decision, that is, to sell the platform he created. At that time, although Ele.me and Meituan also had contact, it seemed that there was no negotiation in terms of price.
Therefore, in the year when Meituan Scenery was listed, Ele.me was sold to the Internet giant Alibaba and became a member of the "Ali family". In fact, as early as around 2015, Alibaba seemed to have been interested in Ele.me, and at that time, there was news that Ali had invested $1.25 billion in Ele.me.
Therefore, Ali was also willing to take over Ele.me at a high price, and the purchase price at that time had reached 9.5 billion US dollars, which was converted into about 66.5 billion yuan. After Zhang Xuhao cashed out 66.5 billion yuan, the shareholders and executives of many of Ele.me's affiliated companies changed their names, and his only position was the chairman of Ele.me.
Since then, there has been almost no zhang Xuhao in the market, and some people speculate that he has been satisfied after achieving wealth freedom. However, 3 years after Ele.me was acquired, Zhang Xuhao seems to have made new moves!
Three years later, he spent 150 million yuan to start a business again
According to media reports, in 2021, Zhang Xuhao released a circle of friends to promote his new project of starting a business again - PLAYGOLF, which is also his long-lost entrepreneurial project. It is reported that Zhang Xuhao chose not catering for this project, but a niche track, creating a golf driving range, and also having teaching and training related content.
It is reported that this seems to be related to his love of sports. Moreover, Zhang Xuhao still chose to start a business in Shanghai this time, and was very generous, directly investing 150 million yuan at the beginning, which shows that he still attaches great importance to this project. And from the perspective of the industry, this market still has a lot of potential.
According to data, the mainland has about 50 million potential golf consumers, and the golf population growth rate has reached 30%, and the market size will exceed 10 billion yuan by 2020. It seems that Zhang Xuhao's entrepreneurial project is really likely to be a big success.
However, what the final result will be We still have to wait and see, after all, Zhang Xuhao is also an entrepreneur who has created Hungry, and has entrepreneurial experience, Zhang Xuhao also has a certain experience, maybe this time he can be successful again? I don't know which software do you usually use to order takeaway? Feel free to leave a message in the comments section.