The O2O showdown between Dianping and Meituan: Platform vs. self-operated

Dianping and Meituan, which started out as merchant reviews and group buying respectively, have become the few survivors in the market after the war of thousands of group buying. As the O2O market began to boom, the two companies have simultaneously set their sights on more segmented vertical fields, such as movie tickets, food delivery, travel, hotels, etc.

A battle of attack and defense is unfolding in the field of O2O local life services. As Dianping invested in Ele.me and expanded its group buying business into Meituan’s core third- and fourth-tier cities, conflicts between the two sides’ local sales staff have been breaking out since the beginning of this year.

However, in general, Dianping and Meituan's layout in vertical fields still show completely different development ideas.

From the perspective of its own positioning, Dianping wants to build itself into an ecosystem, maintain the openness of the platform, and develop segmented industries by setting up vertical industry divisions and cooperation; Meituan chooses to operate on its own and take full responsibility for important business lines; from the perspective of the logic of the layout, whether Dianping's efforts in vertical industries such as hotels, movies, and weddings last year, or the establishment of the beauty division this year, it has always adhered to the core standard of choosing "decision-making" industries; Meituan pays more attention to transactions and how to make such transactions smoother.

On the other hand, when Meituan and Dianping are competing fiercely for the top spot in O2O, Baidu and Alibaba are not willing to fall behind. Baidu CEO Robin Li personally supported Baidu Nuomi and promised to inject 20 billion yuan into the Nuomi business within three years; Alibaba's ambition is to focus on Koubei.com, injecting offline resources and teams from Taodiandian and Ant Financial, and relying on mobile Taobao and Alipay wallets to divert traffic, with an initial investment of 6 billion yuan.

"2015 will be the year of the real O2O decisive battle," Meituan CEO Wang Xing declared at the company's annual meeting.

Positioning differences: platform and self-operated

From a merchant review platform to a group purchase transaction platform, Dianping is getting closer and closer to a local life service platform after several transformations. At the recent press conference of Dianping announcing the establishment of the Beauty Division, Dianping CEO Zhang Tao gave a clear development strategy, namely the strategy of "expanding the ecosystem, strengthening the platform, and reducing the headquarters." In other words, Dianping will continue to maintain the openness of the platform in the future, and the company headquarters will become smaller, mainly controlling the basic capabilities of the platform level, and then entering into specific businesses with vertical industry divisions. Zhang Tao also said that after the establishment of the Beauty Division, Dianping will develop more businesses in this way in the future.

According to Zhang Tao, under this open strategy, Dianping will transform from a single company into an ecosystem in the future. Some vertical businesses may be independent subsidiaries, some may be joint ventures, and some may be multi-party collaborations.

In contrast, although Meituan is also continuously deepening its vertical fields, it has adopted a self-operated model for all of them. For example, it has launched independently operated products in the hotel, movie, and food delivery fields: the hotel business launched Meituan Hotels, the movie business launched Maoyan Movies, and the food delivery business launched Meituan Takeaway - all local life services are operated by themselves.

The result of this model is that Meituan has to face competition from competitors in the corresponding fields. For example, Meituan Waimai launched a fierce price war with another food delivery platform, and then violent incidents occurred between employees of both sides during field promotions; for example, Meituan and Qunar also frequently clashed during the expansion of their offline businesses.

Industry insiders analyzed that, in comparison, Dianping's platform strategy allows it to quickly expand its business categories, but the decision-making power is not determined by Dianping itself; although Meituan has dug deeper into vertical fields in a self-operated manner and has more say, the excessive dispersion of resources and enemies on all sides are difficult problems it needs to solve.

Layout logic: focus on decision-making and transactions

Since last year, Dianping has been working on vertical industries such as hotels, movies, and weddings, and has established business units for each of them. The logic behind this has always been based on two principles: one is that it requires a strong demand for information decision-making and vertical industries related to quality life; the other is that the platform should have a good diversion effect from high frequency to medium and low frequency.

To explain further, on the one hand, Dianping is involved in quality-related industries, which often provide non-standard services. This attribute determines that it must be an industry that focuses on information decision-making, such as beauty and wedding services. Users need a lot of high-quality information and services to support consumption decisions. In addition, online platforms are no longer simply diverting traffic or using discounts to drive transactions, but they must go deep into the entire process of information, transactions and services. This allows Dianping to use information decision-making as a threshold while achieving a closed transaction loop.

On the other hand, Dianping.com gives equal importance to high-frequency and low-frequency businesses, and it has natural attributes and advantages as a platform to divert traffic from high-frequency businesses such as catering to medium- and low-frequency businesses such as beauty.

Because its biggest advantage is that the platform has accumulated a large amount of merchant review data over more than ten years, which has become the largest decision-making entry point for current daily consumption.

Different from the logic of Dianping, Meituan is driven by transactions and is closer to business.

Meituan's main business is group buying, and later it added local life services and gradually incubated more vertically segmented O2O projects. Industry insiders believe that Meituan's primary focus is to facilitate "transactions", and what needs to be done later is how to make transactions smoother and more natural.

In this regard, some analysts pointed out that Meituan’s transaction model has a relatively simple revenue form, namely transaction commission. The advertising value of this type of platform is relatively low because users are sensitive to prices and have low loyalty. As long as there is a cheaper price, users will easily switch.

Capital competition: The competition for financing is getting fiercer

From a capital perspective, the pace of Dianping and Meituan’s latest rounds of financing is very close, which means that the competition in the life service sector in 2015 has entered a white-hot stage.

In January this year, Meituan announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$700 million, with an overall valuation of US$7 billion. This round of financing for Meituan was less than a year away from the previous round: in May 2014, it received a US$300 million Series C financing, led by General Atlantic, and Meituan's overall valuation was about US$4 billion during the C round of financing. Prior to this, Meituan received US$50 million in Series B investments from Alibaba and Sequoia Capital in July 2011, and US$12 million in Series A investments from Sequoia Capital in 2010.

After Meituan’s financing news broke at the end of December last year, Dianping broke the news of its financing of US$800 million almost at the same time. On April 3 this year, Dianping confirmed that it had completed a new round of financing of US$850 million, and the overall valuation of Dianping reached US$4.05 billion in this round of financing.

Judging from the business data, Wang Xing recently revealed that in the first half of 2015, Meituan completed a transaction volume of RMB 47 billion (95% of which was from mobile devices), of which movies exceeded RMB 6 billion, hotel and vacation sales totaled RMB 7.1 billion, and takeaway transactions reached RMB 4.25 billion. Currently, Meituan has 15,000 employees, 1.6 million cooperative merchants, 130 million annual active buyers, 500 million reviews, 100 million user-uploaded pictures, and 1.6 million cooperative merchants.

Dianping has not yet released its latest data for this year. Data released at the end of last year showed that Dianping's monthly group buying transaction volume exceeded 2 billion yuan, and its market share in nearly 20 of the newly developed third- and fourth-tier cities reached the top. In addition, Dianping's monthly active users exceeded 170 million, the number of reviews exceeded 42 million, and the number of included merchants exceeded 10 million.

Previously, an investor revealed that from January to May this year, Meituan's GMV grew by 110%, 95%, 122%, 142%, and 118% year-on-year, respectively, while Dianping's GMV grew by 109%, 129%, 144%, 145%, and 146% year-on-year, respectively, in the first five months. However, the accuracy of this data cannot be confirmed for the time being.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.