Full Report

Figures converted from renminbi (RMB) at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates for the rate table (note: RMB figures are converted at period RMB→USD rates of roughly 0.139 for 2025–2026 and 0.157 for 2021, as the filings report in RMB). Ratios, margins, multiples, order counts and share percentages are unitless and unchanged.

Competitive standing: dominant at the core, under live assault at the edges

Meituan enters 2026 as the structural leader of Chinese local commerce, but for the first time in years its leadership is being paid for out of the P&L rather than banked as profit. On the company's own numbers, the Core Local Commerce segment — food delivery plus in-store, hotel and travel — swung from an operating profit of $1.9 billion (a 21.0% margin) in Q1 2025 to a trough operating loss of $2.0 billion (negative 20.9%) in Q3 2025, before recovering to a $0.3 billion loss (negative 3.2%) in Q1 2026 [1] [2] [3]. Management attributes the reversal squarely to competition: revenue still grew, but "intensified industry competition… weighed on our profitability" as JD.com and Alibaba bought their way into food delivery and instant retail with record subsidies [4].

The read on the decision question is therefore two-sided. Meituan's share is large and, by third-party accounts, has held: independent reports cited by the South China Morning Post put its domestic food-delivery share at roughly 70% through 2025, versus about 65% before the instant-commerce war began. But the defensibility of that share is now visibly costly — the moat still holds, yet the toll to keep the drawbridge up has risen sharply, and it holds most firmly where Meituan owns the delivery network (food delivery, instant retail) and least firmly where the battleground is content and traffic (in-store services, where Douyin has taken ground).

The competitive map: line by line

The brief's spine is per-product share. Meituan discloses almost none of it directly — as a Hong Kong filer in an antitrust-sensitive market it has, since its 2018 IPO, stopped repeating the hard share numbers it once published. So the table below is explicit about provenance: "disclosed" cells trace to a filing page; "estimate" cells are third-party and labelled as such; "qualitative" cells are a position (leader / challenger / niche) the record supports but does not quantify.

Sources: Meituan disclosures — food delivery / in-store leadership per the 2018 Global Offering PHIP (iResearch, 2017) [5]; Meituan Select exit [6]; competitor identities per Alibaba [7], JD.com [8], Trip.com [9]. Share percentages are third-party estimates (iResearch, Trustdata, Momentum Works, SCMP), not company-disclosed.

Scale is the moat: on-demand delivery

Meituan's defensibility in food delivery rests on a self-reinforcing loop that a challenger cannot buy quickly: the densest merchant base and the largest proprietary rider network drive the fastest, cheapest fulfilment, which wins users and frequency, which draws more merchants. At its 2018 IPO the company was already, per iResearch, "the world's largest on-demand food delivery service provider and China's largest e-commerce platform for in-store dining services" [10], handling ~13.5 million daily food-delivery transactions across ~2,500 cities [11] on the world's largest on-demand delivery network, with ~531,000 daily active riders in Q4 2017 [12].

That scale has since compounded. Peak daily order volume moved from above 50 million in 2021 to over 60 million in 2022 to a record 78 million in Q3 2023, and on-demand delivery orders (food delivery plus Instashopping) surpassed 150 million per day in July 2025 — far above the 100-million long-term target set at the IPO — with monthly active users above 600 million [13] [14] [15] [16].

The 2021–2023 figures are food-delivery peak daily orders; the July 2025 figure is on-demand delivery (food delivery plus Instashopping), a broader definition. Sources: FY2021 AR, peak daily orders (p.12) [17]; FY2022 AR, peak daily orders (p.13) [18]; Q3 2023 results p.4 [19]; Q2 2025 call p.1 [20].

On a full-year basis, on-demand delivery transactions reached 21,893.2 million in 2023, up 23.9% year over year from 17,670.2 million in 2022 — a base no rival is close to matching [21]. Management's Q1 2026 language — the "go-to platform for on-demand delivery," a leadership "built not only on competitive pricing, but… on comprehensive services, reliable fulfilment capabilities, and high-quality supply" — is a claim to be tested, but the volume record and third-party share estimates corroborate it [22].

The 2025–26 assault: JD and Alibaba enter, and the P&L pays

The competitive event that defines this cycle is the entry of two deep-pocketed e-commerce incumbents into on-demand delivery. JD.com "officially launched JD Food Delivery" in February 2025 [23]; the scale of its push is visible in its own accounts, where "New Businesses" revenue jumped 157.3% to $7,047 million in 2025, "largely due to the rapid scaling of JD Food Delivery" [24]. Alibaba, meanwhile, rebranded Ele.me into "Taobao Instant Commerce," which it now describes as "a leading local services and on-demand delivery platform in China," and grew the associated quick-commerce revenue line to roughly $10.9 billion in its FY2026 (ended March 2026), up roughly 47% from $7.4 billion [25] [26].

The result was a subsidy war. Across 2025, according to press reporting (CNBC, Sixth Tone), Meituan, Alibaba and JD together spent on the order of $11 billion on delivery subsidies and marketing; at the peak in summer 2025, Alibaba's Taobao/Ele.me claimed ~80 million daily orders and JD an estimated ~20 million, against Meituan's ~150 million. Those war-time order counts briefly narrowed the gap, but third-party assessments treat Meituan's ~70% structural share as intact — the subsidised volumes proved expensive to hold rather than durable. Meituan's own segment economics tell the story cleanly: Core Local Commerce operating margin fell from +21.0% (Q1 2025) to +5.7% (Q2) to a −20.9% trough (Q3) as it "increased Transacting User incentives and promotion and advertising expenses… to fortify market position amid the intensified competition," then recovered toward −3.2% by Q1 2026 as the industry moderated [27] [28] [29] [30].

Source: Meituan quarterly results — Q1 2025 p.12 [31]; Q2 2025 p.13 [32]; Q3 2025 p.12 [33]; Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 p.15 [34].

The daily-order snapshot below sizes the three-way fight at its mid-2025 peak. It is drawn from press and company commentary, not from a Meituan filing, and different trackers give materially different splits depending on whether they count food only or all instant-retail orders — so it is indicative of the pecking order, not a precise share.

Third-party / company commentary, July 2025 (CNBC, SCMP, company disclosures). Figures mix food-delivery and broader instant-retail orders and are not directly comparable across platforms; indicative only, not company-reconciled shares.

Instant retail: extending the delivery moat into a $137 billion adjacency

Instant retail — 30-minute delivery of groceries, medicine and general goods — is where Meituan's rider network converts most directly into a second franchise. Meituan Instashopping's highest daily order volume grew from above 6.3 million in December 2021 to over 11 million in December 2022, with transacting users and merchants each up nearly 30% [35] [36]. The company has built the supply side to match — Meituan InstaMarts (flash warehouses), Branded Flagship InstaMarts and the self-operated Xiaoxiang Supermarket front distribution centres are described as "important supply pillars for quick commerce" [37]. This is the growth engine inside the New Initiatives segment, whose revenue rose 21.3% year over year to $3.8 billion in Q1 2026 on grocery-retail and overseas expansion, even as its operating loss narrowed [38].

Meituan does not disclose an instant-retail share, and here estimates diverge more widely than in food delivery. Momentum Works pegs Instashopping's 2024 GTV near $37 billion with a market share around 45%, in a quick-commerce market approaching $137 billion by 2025; other trackers put Meituan's real-time-retail share closer to 60%. Either way the direction is clear — Meituan is the largest single player, but Alibaba's Taobao Instant Commerce and JD are contesting this adjacency harder than they ever contested food delivery, precisely because it links to their core e-commerce.

In-store, hotel and travel: the softest flank, and a hotel surprise

In-store services — restaurant deals, group-buying vouchers, services marketing — is Meituan's original business and its most contested. The threat is structural: short-video platforms convert content traffic into local-services transactions without owning fulfilment. Kuaishou reports local-services revenue growing 2.6x year over year with GMV more than doubling in Q4 2024 [39], and the larger disruptor, ByteDance's Douyin, has by third-party accounts (36Kr, tech analysts) pushed local-services payment GTV above $118 billion. Meituan's response is to lean on merchant tools and curated supply — its Black Pearl, Must-Eat and Must-Stay lists and expanding AI merchant tools — and it still frames itself as having "further solidified our leading position in user structure and consumer mindshare amid a fierce competition environment" [40]. That is a leader defending, not extending — in-store is the one core line where Meituan has plainly ceded share.

Hotels and travel are more favourable than the headline "Ctrip owns travel" framing suggests. In-store, hotel and travel revenue grew 53.1% to $5.1 billion in 2021 as the segment recovered from COVID [41], and on volume Meituan has for years been China's largest hotel-booking platform by domestic room nights — third-party trackers (Trustdata) put its room-night share near 50% in 2019, ahead of the combined Ctrip/Qunar/Tongcheng group. The split is by tier: Meituan leads the low- and mid-tier, mass-market segment via cross-sell from its local app, while Trip.com's brands remain "a leading provider of travel and related services in China" in high-star hotels and outbound travel [42]. So Meituan is the volume leader and a revenue challenger in the same market — a distinction the section's share table makes explicit.

Community group buying: the one it fought for, lost, and exited

Not every contested market went Meituan's way, and it is candid about the one it lost. Community group buying (next-day grocery pickup) was a scale war against Pinduoduo's Duoduo Grocery. By the end of 2023 Meituan conceded that Meituan Select "still made significant loss with high operating loss ratio," blaming slower-than-expected scale and "fierce competition which made it difficult to improve price mark-up ratio and lower subsidies," adding that "this market was much tougher than we originally expected" and that it would prioritise unit economics "rather than focusing on market share" [43]. That retreat became an exit: by Q1 2026 the company reports "the discontinuation for Meituan Select," redirecting grocery ambitions into the higher-quality Xiaoxiang Supermarket model [44]. It is the clearest evidence in the record that Meituan's moat is category-specific — strong where it owns on-demand fulfilment, weak in a commoditised, capital-intensive grocery-logistics fight it could not out-economics Pinduoduo.

Overseas (Keeta): a funded challenger, not a leader

Internationally, Meituan is explicitly the insurgent. Keeta launched in Riyadh in October 2024 [45] and rapidly became "one of the preferred food delivery platforms in the region" [46]. By end-2025 it had reached positive unit economics in Hong Kong, sustained rapid order growth in Saudi Arabia, and expanded into Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Brazil [47]. But the incumbent it is attacking is formidable: Delivery Hero runs talabat and HungerStation across the GCC, where "talabat continued its strong performance" and HungerStation holds a leading position in Saudi Arabia [48]. Keeta's China playbook — rider-network efficiency and subsidy firepower — is transferable, but overseas it is buying share from a leader, not defending one, and the segment remains a loss-funded option rather than a proven franchise.

What would change the conclusion

The competitive verdict is a leader whose relative share has held but whose profitability has become the shock absorber for competition. Three things would move it. First, durability of the truce: Q1 2026's recovery to a −3.2% Core Local Commerce margin assumed moderating subsidies [49]; a re-escalation by Alibaba or JD, both of which can fund losses from other profit pools, would push margins back toward the Q3 2025 trough. Second, the in-store flank: if Douyin's content-commerce model keeps compounding local-services GMV, Meituan's highest-margin business is where share erosion actually dents the P&L. Third, regulation: press reporting indicates Chinese authorities have weighed steps to defuse the food-delivery subsidy war, which — like the 2021 antitrust cycle — could freeze competitive dynamics in the incumbent's favour. The evidence supports calling Meituan the winner on share; it does not yet support calling the fight over.

Currency note: figures are converted from Meituan's reported renminbi (RMB) — the reporting currency of its Hong Kong filings — into US dollars at period RMB→USD rates, and competitor figures are converted from each company's reported RMB. Percentages, margins and order counts are unit-independent. Third-party market-share and market-size figures are attributed in the prose and are not company-disclosed.