Chinese local e-commerce marketplace Meituan disclosed that the gross merchandise volume in the first half of 2014 surpassed RMB16 billion (roughly US$260 million) which is the volume for the whole of last year. Over 70% transactions were through mobile.
Meituan estimates it has 56% -57% a market share, Gan Jiawei, COO of the company, said so in an interview with local media.(report in Chinese) Currently it’s major competitors are Tencent-backed Dianping and Baidu-backed Nuomi. Meituan itself is funded by Alibaba Group. Mr. Gan said in the aforementioned interview that Meituan’s competitive advantages include the salesforce, more than 3000 sales representatives (Grougpon had a team of more than 3500 when before it launched IPO in 2011), the company has built.
CatEye (not official translation), the movie ticketing app by Meituan launched in 2012, has had approximately 20 million installs and become a major player in China’s movie ticketing market. Meituan expects CatEye to account for 20% of the total movie ticket sales and 70% of online movie ticketing in China by year end. The service was recently introduced onto Wandoujia (aka SnapPea), a mobile app & in-app search service, that users are able to buy tickets directly after CatEye entries are returned as search results.
Meituan launched a separate app for food delivery in early this year. The company is also working on an enterprise WiFi router program hoping to have offline merchants adopt its solution so that Meituan and merchants can interact, pushing deals or ads, with every customer that visits any stores. It is believed that Meituan is in preparation for US IPO.
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