Meituan Dianping is a “universal” app that’s becoming popular in China: it allows you to order food, buy products, book movie tickets and rent transportation.
A universal app. In fact, a “super app”. Meituan Dianping is a very popular app in China that is recording record numbers: 35 million people use the service every day and has almost 600 million active users. The reason for this success? Simple: Meituan Dianping does just about everything. The app offers users a “life life” service platform capable of meeting every need thanks to 4.5 million business partners located throughout China. Through the app you can shop online, order (and receive) food at home, book movie tickets or find the nearest bicycle rental. Thanks to this wide range of services offered, in 2018 the super app enabled an average of 178 services per second, for a total of 5,613,408,000 (read: 5 billion, 613 million and 408 thousand) transactions in twelve months.
Meituan Dianping: the numbers of the “universal app”.
The super app was born in 2015 from the merger of two important companies already very strong in the Chinese market: Meituan, a platform for booking and receiving food at home – and Dianping, a restaurant booking site with Tripadvisor “style” customer reviews. According to data released by Agenzia Nova, in the last quarter Meituan Dianping recorded 2.5 billion orders, generating a transaction volume of 111.9 billion yuan ($15.9 billion). Compared to 2018, the company’s total turnover is up 40% year-on-year and, over the period under review, is close to 5.7 billion yuan (over $810 million). These numbers have not escaped the analysts of the economic magazine Fast Company, which, in the annual ranking of the 50 most innovative companies in the world, awarded first place to Meituan Dianping. To give an idea of the importance of this recognition is enough to say that, in 2018, the first two places were respectively Apple (this year at 17′ place) and Netflix (now outside the Top50).