After clearly crossing the critical point of scale effect, the understanding of the US group has reached an important point in time.
According to the late Latepost report, Meituan recently set up a special retail group, the team includes: Meituan founder, CEO Wang Xing, senior vice president, president of the home business group Wang Puzhong, senior vice president, general manager of the preferred business unit Chen Liang, fast donkey business unit general manager Guo Wanhuai, vice president, Meituan platform general manager Li Shubin, etc., the group will integrate the preferred, fast donkey, grocery shopping and other businesses, chen Liang is responsible.
The establishment of the special retail group means that Meituan has raised the physical retail business to a new height, and after the independent exploration of each business in the early stage, Meituan is intending to pinch it into a whole and unify the output.
However, investors should not be too simple to confuse meituan's retail business with various industry outlets. In 36Kr's view, at the beginning of choosing to do business such as grocery shopping, community group buying, fast donkey and even good group goods, Meituan's thinking is very clear - to do physical retail. It's just that it takes trial and error and iteration to run out of a certain scale.
Wang Xing has also shared internally many times that Meituan has been doing retail, in the past, group buying, takeaway, wine and tourism business was the mainstay, doing service retail, and now Meituan has to do more physical retail.
From the perspective of business logic, this integration is also very clear: Meituan buys vegetables to position the front-end warehouse model in first-tier cities, focusing on "1 hour to home"; Meituan prefers to focus on the sinking market, emphasizing the width of coverage; fast donkey positions the B2B supply chain and serves small B merchants. After the integration is completed, Meituan's retail business will cover the C-end to the B-end, from the first-line to the vast majority of merchants and users in the down-city market.
As part of meituan's physical retail, group good goods, flash purchases and drug purchases have not been included, which may have Meituan's own considerations, but in the long run, the above three major businesses may not be too far away from being included in the retail group.
Getting rid of the perspective of isolated classification business, what Meituan is promoting is also all about the optimization of resource allocation in the broad "e-commerce" market. The new retail business has brought losses in the short term, but in the longer term, its contribution to the Meituan ecosystem will not be limited to the business itself.
Along with this, Meituan will implement the strategy of "Food + Platform" for nearly 4 years to "retail + technology", and no longer emphasize "eating" as the core. The change of strategy also means a change in the business logic of the US group, so why is the adjustment made at the moment, and what does this adjustment explain?
From the perspective of main business, the scale effect of Meituan is crossing the critical point.
As of December 31, 2020, the number of active merchants on the Meituan platform reached 6.8 million, and the number of annual transaction users reached 510 million, correspondingly, the company's annual revenue exceeded 100 billion yuan, reaching a record high of 114.8 billion yuan, up 17.7% year-on-year.
More importantly, in the past two quarters, after the "two alternatives" monopoly clause was lifted, Meituan's main business data, including takeaway revenue, takeaway profit margin, active users and merchants, have continued to rise.
Taking the takeaway business as an example, in the second quarter, Meituan's catering takeaway revenue reached 23.12 billion yuan, an increase of 59% year-on-year, while the operating profit reached a record high of 2.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 95.2%, and the operating profit margin increased from 8.6% to 10.6%. In the second quarter, the unit price of Meituan's takeaway customers reached 49 yuan, a slight increase of 0.4% year-on-year, which is not easy in the takeaway season. As a result, the profit of a single takeaway order of the Us group in the second quarter was also close to 0.7 yuan, the best in history.
The policy bearishness did not substantially affect the Business of the US Group, but further increased, which to a certain extent shows that the business ecology of "Food + Platform" has a considerable scale effect.
But many great companies in history have proved that the scale effect is not only a dividend, after crossing the critical point of the effect, the growth rate and revenue will be stagnant due to the scale, the specific US group, although this critical point has not yet been obviously revealed, but the outside world generally speculates that its scale dividend is approaching.
The so-called "tipping point of user scale", the simple understanding is that user stickiness begins to cross regions, ages, segmentation needs... And extend from the consumer side to the merchants and suppliers upstream of the platform. To meet this demand, it is necessary for the platform to continuously provide diversified services, so it can be understood that Meituan has shifted its strategy from "Food + Platform" to "retail + technology", which is not so much a "new story" as it is the inevitable development of history.
Specific to the practical end, the opening of meituan's new business imagination space is a necessary condition for Meituan to set up a special retail group.
After more than a year of exploration, Meituan's community group buying business has basically covered all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in the country, crossed the racetrack, and entered the stage of refined operation, competing in the supply chain and performance capabilities. According to 36Kr, the number of community group purchases in the third quarter has rebounded, and the daily orders of meituan preferred have been around 35 million, and the expected target at the end of the year is 60 million, which has a considerable scale.
According to Meituan's own estimates, in the future, community group buying is expected to achieve a profit of 2-3 cents per piece (counted as "pieces" in online single copies, such as apricot abalone mushrooms 250g as one piece). Changqiao Securities also predicted that in the future, the unit price of community group purchase counterparts is about 12 yuan, and the operating profit of 2-3 gross pieces per piece is estimated according to the GMV of 2.5 trillion yuan per year, which is equivalent to the industry profit margin of 40 billion to 60 billion yuan.
For Meituan, in addition to being an incremental market and expanding its own business boundaries, there is also a self-evident point that in this way, it finally arrives at the end of physical retail, which is why Wang Xing has always emphasized that the front of community group buying is the "sea of stars".
In fact, before the establishment of the special retail group, meituan has been exploring in a low-key manner for a long time on physical e-commerce, and the good goods of the group are proof. Different from community group buying, group goods are third-party goods under the typical platform physical e-commerce POP model, mainly standard products, and have covered 13 first-level categories and 44 second-level categories.
At present, Tuanhao goods has 4 major traffic entrances, independent APP, Meituan APP, Meituan takeaway APP and WeChat Mini Program. The Meituan APP gives multiple traffic bits: the top fixed navigation button, the bottom of the separate e-commerce Tab entrance, the middle "guess you like" and "today's special price" two major plate information flow recommendation. According to 36Kr, the current daily single volume of good goods has been around 700,000 orders.
In addition, the financial report shows that in the second quarter, the transaction volume of Meituan flash sale and GTV increased by more than 140% year-on-year, and the GTV growth of Meituan grocery shopping was more than 280%, according to 36Kr, the current daily order volume of Meituan flash sale has exceeded 4 million, ranking first in the industry, and the proportion of "flash purchase + grocery shopping" and fast donkey in the new business is around 30% (3.6 billion). From the current market point of view, Meituan may be the only e-commerce platform that can cover people with different consumption capacities at the same time.
In the first quarter of the conference call, Wang Xing said that the goal of Meituan's preferred choice is to bring 300-400 million new users to Meituan in the next few years, and Meituan has achieved nearly 120 million new users in the past two quarters.
Previously, the outside world has been worried about "how Meituan will fully feed these new users into the main business, and how the main business users will be attracted to different retail businesses", and now Meituan has given the answer.
But at present, Meituan has not completely integrated the preferred, fast donkey and grocery shopping business, this is just the first step in meituan's "retail + technology" positioning, and with the growth of several major retail businesses in the future, the integration of the team will be inevitable, and the management ability of meituan outside the business will also be tested.