Meituan announced a price cut, and the takeaway began to roll up again?

The takeaway platform is going to "tighten the belt" to live?

01

Takeaway delivery returns to the "ternary era"

Two years ago, at the beginning of the epidemic, Meituan's Wang Xing mentioned in an internal speech:

The next 10 years are destined to be "awesome and hard".

Whether Meituan has become more awesome this year, I don't know.

But this year's Meituan takeaway brother must be pressing.

Recently, Shenzhen Meituan issued a notice to optimize the structure of delivery fees in order to provide a stable and sustainable platform for riders to earn money and support their families.

As long as you hear Internet companies say similar to what optimization and regulation, output graduation, don't think about it is definitely not a good thing——

It's either layoffs or salary cuts.

As a result, after this notice, many of the order delivery fees that we saw decreased significantly, and a large number of orders with more than three pieces appeared on the platform.

Among them, the delivery fee of large orders is also not subsidized, and some riders have screenshots showing that they delivered a large order with a total price of 153 yuan.

The final delivery fee was 4.4 yuan, and more was 3.4 yuan, and the previous subsidy was gone.

Not only Meituan reduced the delivery fee and reduced the corresponding subsidy, but even Dada and SF also cut the delivery fee accordingly.

This wave of price cuts is too ruthless, and directly pulls Shenzhen's delivery fees to the "three-yuan era".

This year is indeed difficult, and Meituan may also have operational cost considerations, but this wave is indeed a bit unethical.

A platform company, the goods are merchants, the riders are outsourced, just by matching information to make a lot of money, there is original sin.

From the perspective of merchants, they were previously required to choose one of the two, with a commission of more than 20%, and they were forced to issue coupons, and they also had to spend money to buy ranked traffic.

From the rider's point of view, employees who wear overalls of the platform but are not on the platform do not have enough social security. Big data will constantly squeeze the delivery time, and the rampage and running red lights in the retrograde direction are all forced out.

And now, even the delivery fee has to be cut.

02

Meituan, what's wrong?

A company as large as Meituan, with more than 6 million riders alone, suddenly announced the adjustment of the distribution fee structure, it cannot be a hot head and a decision made by patting the thigh, there must be a certain logical support behind it.

The first is that rider teams are oversupplied in the job market.

The employment situation during this period is really not very good. The National Urban Survey unemployment rate in February was 5.6 percent, a slight increase from the previous one, released by the Bureau of Statistics.

Among them, the unemployment rate of 16-24 year olds (excluding school students) reached 18.1%, the highest among all age groups.

And this age group is precisely the main force of urban takeaway brothers. In the case of deteriorating employment situation, relatively flexible takeaway, express delivery, and online car hailing have become their employment options as a transitional stage.

Starting from 2022, the number of college graduates will break 10 million. There was a previous survey: 7 million takeaway brothers in China, master's degree or above accounted for 1%, which means that 70,000 master's students are delivering food. Bachelor's degree accounted for 3%, that is, 210,000, a total of 280,000 people with bachelor's degree or above.

Riders have also become the "future" of college graduates when they can't find a suitable job. The social population and fresh graduates are both facing employment difficulties, and the group of takeaway brothers will naturally expand greatly.

There was also news before, saying that Meituan Distribution launched the "Spring Breeze Sending Jobs" action in 2023, launched six major measures to ensure employment and help recovery, and announced the opening of 500,000 riders, station managers and other distribution service positions in advance.

You know, China's takeaway market has basically peaked now, there is not much room for growth, the market has decided that takeaway delivery is basically fixed, and it is impossible to expand so many rider positions.

Then there is only one possibility - Meituan came with the task of "stable employment".

But if the labor is redundant, then the labor is not valuable, and from the most basic economic principle of market supply and demand, the reduction of the unit price of distribution is also in line with the law.

Secondly, there is also a dark line that Meituan is conducting a pilot in order to "throttle open source".

Meituan's takeaway business model is not complicated

- Draw commissions, merchants, riders, both ends.

If you want to improve the company's profits, there are three ways: either expand the customer base, increase the platform commission, or reduce the rider delivery fee.

It is now difficult to expand the source of customers, the stock of the takeaway market is basically eaten by Meituan, and the marginal cost of attracting new customers is very high.

It is impossible to increase the commission of the platform and let the merchant pay more wool. Meituan was fined 3.442 billion yuan for choosing one of the two before, and the red line of anti-monopoly is expected to be touched by them.

What's more, let alone increase commissions, now all public opinion is putting pressure on them to reduce commissions.

The ninth layer of the Guangdong Catering Service Industry Association pointed out that Meituan takes a high commission, and requires a reduction of 5% or more of the commission for outdoor sales services of Guangdong caterers during the epidemic.

However, Meituan's commission has reached the point where it cannot be reduced, and in such a small profit, if Meituan's takeaway commission declines again, then its transaction volume, revenue and other data will be under pressure, and it will also face huge losses.

If Meituan takeaway carries the commission and reduces the pressure for a few months, the platform may go to another possibility - it can't continue.

So, there's only one way left – reducing rider delivery fees.

First, now riders themselves are oversupplied, belonging to the "seller's market" in the labor market, and it is reasonable to reduce the unit price.

Second, as an individual, the rider's labor bargaining power is not strong, and it is much easier than increasing commissions.

This public news only Shenzhen announced the delivery fee reduction, then it is likely to be used as a pilot

——If Shenzhen is successful, it will be rolled out nationwide.

03

Meituan, the crisis has arrived?

Since last year, two words have been repeatedly mentioned within them:

Survival and cost control.

"If Meituan doesn't have any revenue in the next three years and the company still has to keep running, what will be the cash flow situation?"

Wang Xing's sense of crisis became stronger.

Ensuring cash flow security, pursuing profitable growth, and systematically reducing costs and increasing efficiency have become the new goals pursued by this trillion-dollar Internet giant from 2022.

Meituan is not short of money, with 25.5 billion yuan in cash on its account, but it has begun to tighten its belts to live. The same is true of the giants, who have money but have lost their wayward capital.

In fact, for Meituan, the crisis may be approaching. According to Meituan's latest financial report, the operating income in the first three quarters of 2022 was 62.619 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.24%, and it can be said that Meituan set a new high in its performance in the most difficult year of the epidemic.

However, this is only a situation of revenue, from the net profit point of view, Meituan, not only does not make money, but also lost more than 5 billion. The entire group loses money, and the most likely takeaway business is also a loss, after all, the most important thing to support Meituan's performance is takeaway.

Data for 2022 is not available, but in 2021, when it is widely believed that the epidemic has stimulated takeaway consumption, the total order volume of its catering takeout and Meituan flash sale business increased by 16.2% year-on-year. Meituan's revenue and operating loss in 2021 were 179.13 billion yuan and -23.1 billion yuan, respectively. As Meituan's core business, the food delivery business had a revenue of 96.3 billion yuan.

Behind the high revenue, there are rising costs and persistent losses. Among them, Meituan's takeaway rider cost was 68.2 billion yuan, accounting for 71% of the total revenue. For the whole year, Meituan's delivery rider delivery costs reached 68.2 billion yuan, an increase of 38% over the previous year, which accounted for 71% of takeaway revenue. In comparison, Meituan's food and beverage delivery service revenue from merchants and users was only 54.2 billion yuan.

Takeaway delivery service revenue was RMB14.3 billion and related costs were RMB18.3 billion. In other words, Meituan takeaway delivery lost more than 1 yuan in 1 order. That makes sense:

Meituan's main source of performance is takeaway - the biggest cost of takeaway is the rider - cut the unit price of the rider - "reduce costs and increase efficiency".

However, the crisis in the earnings report is only one aspect, and what really makes Meituan nervous is that Douyin is deploying takeaways.

The biggest resource in the Internet industry is traffic, and the two hegemons with the largest traffic at present, one is WeChat, and the other is Douyin.

In 2022, Meituan's daily activity will be the highest 85 million; But at present, Douyin's daily activity has reached nearly 700 million, and the two are not at all in the same volume.

In the middle of last year, Douyin introduced Ele.me to solve key takeaway delivery problems, and at the same time launched a local life group buying business to cultivate users' consumption habits.

At the end of last year, it connected to T3 taxi and a number of local travel services, and also reached cooperation with SF, Dada and Flash Delivery to provide package delivery services for merchants in pilot cities.

At the beginning of this year, it launched a large-scale recruitment of talents for takeaway business on many recruitment platforms.

Douyin's entry into takeaway is already on the line.

When the news that Douyin was preparing to enter the food delivery market came out, Meituan's stock price fell by 9%, and its market value lost nearly 100 billion Hong Kong dollars.

Before the people arrived, the voice came first, and the friends had fallen!

Here's a question about Meituan's psychology: I'm really a plug Q, and I finally beat Ele.me to the stomach, and I killed Cheng Biting Jin (Douyin) halfway.

Reducing delivery fees now seems to be only one of the steps in Meituan's adjustment strategy, including the rumor that Meituan Takeaway entered Hong Kong some time ago, preparing to use this as a springboard to explore overseas markets, all of which are their responses to the current market environment.

The takeaway pattern in 2023 looks like it will change greatly!

This is also a trend. In the half of the Internet, the basic skills are not very good, and you can also rely on dividends, strategy, and resources to drive rapid development, but in the second half, the basic skills are not up to the mark, and it is difficult to survive. Meituan now seems to be firmly in the position of the first brother of the takeaway platform, but in the rapidly changing economic environment, it is likely to be like Nokia in one or two years, and the market competition has always been so cruel.

A sense of crisis is a must for enterprises in any period, and it is also necessary for today's Meituan.