More than a year after co-founder Wang Huiwen retired, the second Meituan veteran left the front line of business.
Wen 丨 Marcoshin
Edited by 丨Guan Yiwen
"LatePost" exclusively learned that on January 29, Meituan released an email to the company's director and above management, announcing that senior vice president Chen Liang would gradually detach from the business line and focus on organizational construction and strategic research.
It is understood that Chen Liang will not leave the company, but will take a step back and assist CEO Wang Xing in strategic and organizational management. He is still a member of the S-team, the top decision-making body of the US group.
Chen Liang has worked in Meituan for 11 years, he is a start-up of Meituan, senior vice president, a member of the highest decision-making body s-team, and a member of the newly established g-team (commodity group) of Meituan in October last year, which coordinates the management of three business units: grocery shopping, fast donkey, and preferential selection.
Chen Liang's adjustment was not sudden for Meituan employees. A Meituan source said that Chen Liang has been proposing this idea for more than half a year, and since then, meituan has been preparing for this matter.
According to "LatePost", after Chen Liang leaves the front line of business, the management authority and responsibility of Guo Wanhuai, vice president of Meituan, who originally reported to Chen Liang, will be further expanded. Meituan Preferred, Fast Donkey, and Meituan Will All Report to Guo Wanhuai one after another. Chen Liang will assist Guo Wanhuai in the handover over. In November 2021, the preferred business in Chen Liang's hands has been handed over to Guo Wanhuai.
Chen Liang, 42 years old this year, is a middle and high school classmate of Wang Xing, the founder of meituan, who first founded the intranet with Wang Xing, and then founded Taofang.com with Wang Huiwen. In 2011, Taofang was acquired by Meituan, and Wang Huiwen joined Meituan with more than ten people, including Chen Liang and Lai Binqiang. Chen Liang was internally known as "Brother Liang", and several Meituan employees described him as "gentle" and "elegant", saying that his treatment of subordinates was "followed by good manners".
Chen Liang joined Meituan as the head of the mobile business unit. Since then, Chen Liang has experienced and led many important battles of the US regiment, successively serving as the head of the wine brigade, grocery shopping, and preferential selection. He led Meituan to break through from Ctrip, the first place in the OTA industry, and brought Meituan's wine and tourism to the second place in the industry.
A meituan person commented that Chen Liang is a person of integrity, rigorous in his work, and has his own rhythm and method. During the epidemic in 2020, the grocery shopping division had tried a model similar to that of community e-commerce, when Chen Liang did not see the internal (community e-commerce) model very clearly, so that everyone could focus on buying vegetables.
When taking the preferred business, unlike the lightning style of buying more vegetables and orange heart preferred, Chen Liang is more concerned about the construction of logistics and supply chain, he believes that the US group should first find the direction, and then step on the accelerator, and repeatedly emphasize the basic skills of retail internally.
Community group buying is an important business of Meituan's retail sector, and it is also the business that Meituan has invested the most at present. Wang Xing once said at the earnings report meeting that meituan's preferred choice is an important opportunity that can only be held once in ten years. Meituan regards Pinduoduo as one of its most important competitors, and is currently slightly behind Pinduoduo – in November 2021, the total GMV of Duoduoduo in the country was about 120% of Meituan's preferred.
Both the grocery shopping and fast donkey businesses are still in the exploration period, and both have experienced expansion to contraction in 2021. According to the "LatePost" previously reported, the grocery shopping business recently suspended the Suzhou Kaicheng plan, shrinking the scale of the front warehouse, and some warehouses with poor data and less UE than expected will be optimized and adjusted.
The fast donkey business also proposed the expansion plan of the "Battle of 100 Cities" in early 2021, planning to expand with a platform model that is lighter than self-operation. Since then, it has opened up about 70 cities, mainly third-tier cities. In less than a year, Fast Donkey began to suspend business in some cities and began to lay off employees, retaining only first- and second-tier cities.
After Wang Huiwen retired, the US group ushered in a difficult battle - the battle of community group buying. Last year, including CEO Wang Xing, all the executives of meituan took on more work. At the moment when Chen Liang left the front line of business, whether it was preferred, or fast donkey, or buying vegetables, these three battles were far from winning or losing, and they still faced many uncertainties. It is foreseeable that 2022 will be full of challenges for Meituan.
(Wan Pei also contributed to this article)