Meituan announces full-year performance after the takeout battle, focusing on both overseas expansion and AI development

How does Meituan achieve market share stability in the cutthroat competition?

On March 26, Meituan released its performance report for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2025. The announcement showed that Meituan’s total revenue for the year was 364.9 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 8%.

The biggest change in the financial report is the net profit. Meituan stated that due to the “cutthroat” competition in the instant retail industry, the performance for 2025 shifted from profit to loss, with a net loss of 23.4 billion RMB for the year, compared to a profit of 35.8 billion RMB in 2024.

Delivering the takeout battle report card

This financial performance is not surprising, as Meituan had issued a profit warning in February.

The losses mainly stem from two aspects: first, the core local business shifted from profit to loss. Meituan stated that to cope with the unprecedentedly fierce competition in 2025, the company strategically increased its investment in the entire ecosystem to enhance core advantages and drive sustainable growth. Second, the company further increased its investment in overseas operations.

In 2025, Meituan’s core local business segment generated revenue of 260.8 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 4.2%, with an operating loss of 6.9 billion RMB. In the fourth quarter, the operating loss of the core local business reached 10 billion RMB, narrowing compared to the third quarter.

Meituan CEO Wang Xing summarized 2025 as “a year of coexistence of opportunities and challenges,” stating, “We firmly ‘oppose cutthroat competition’ and focus on doing the right things.”

The final result is that Meituan maintained over 60% of the GTV market share with losses far below those of its competitors, and retained an absolute advantage in the mid-to-high price range dining market.

At the management communication meeting in March, Meituan’s core local business CEO Wang Puzhong stated that this market share relied mainly on upholding user experience and continuous innovation.

In addition, last year, the core local business continuously deepened the synergy between product retail and service retail. Driven by this, Meituan’s annual transaction user count and user consumption frequency reached new highs.

Seeking sustainable growth momentum

New businesses have become the driving force for Meituan’s performance growth.

Meituan stated that in 2025, its grocery retail business and overseas business achieved strong growth, driving the revenue of new business segments to 104 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 19%.

Last year, Meituan’s “Little Elephant Supermarket” and overseas business accelerated their progress. By the end of 2025, Little Elephant Supermarket had entered 39 cities nationwide. To further layout its front warehouse business, Meituan announced in February that it had completed the acquisition of 100% of the shares of Dingdong Maicai’s China business for an initial consideration of approximately 717 million USD (approximately 4.98 billion RMB).

In terms of internationalization, Keeta is accelerating its global layout. Following Hong Kong, Keeta has completed coverage in major countries in the Middle East and is expanding its operations in Brazil. Meituan stated that in Hong Kong, Keeta continues to consolidate its market position and achieved a positive UE in the fourth quarter. In new markets such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Brazil, Keeta has also demonstrated strong growth momentum.

Wang Xing also sent a new signal at the management communication meeting. When mentioning Meituan’s internationalization, Wang Xing stated that investments in Brazil should not be rolled out comprehensively but should select suitable locations, forget past successful experiences, and refine the model before expanding.

In addition to international business, another development focus for Meituan is AI. Wang Xing previously stated that the changes brought by AI would be much greater than those brought by the entire internet, significantly affecting organizations and work patterns. For Meituan, the digitization of the physical world will be a very important foundation for AI.

Regarding AI development, core local business CEO Wang Puzhong provided a clearer development path: Meituan will firmly invest in its proprietary foundational large model, creating distinctive low-inference-cost models. At the same time, it will focus on both hardware and information. On one hand, it will invest in the R&D of logistics, robotics, and related technologies, such as drones and unmanned vehicles; on the other hand, it will build rich physical world information and authentic evaluations to capture real-time dynamic information for models and C-end agents.

By the end of 2025, Meituan’s drones will have opened 70 routes in multiple cities domestically and internationally, completing over 780,000 orders in total.

In the past year, Meituan has released multiple AI-related products. On March 2, the team behind Meituan’s Year Beyond (GN06) announced that the Tabbit AI browser has entered public testing. The Year Beyond team stated that the target user group for this product includes office workers, students, and content creators.

Additionally, Meituan launched user-facing AI assistants “Xiao Mei” and “Xiao Tuan.” During the Spring Festival holiday, over 100 million users utilized “Xiao Tuan” to plan their consumption for dining, entertainment, and leisure, with “Xiao Tuan” verifying national merchant information 700 million times. So far, more than 3.4 million merchants have used Meituan’s AI merchant management assistant.

Recently, Meituan also upgraded its food safety governance large model “Star Eye,” using AI to assist in verifying store authenticity, kitchen environment alerts, and various other processes.

(This article is from Yicai Global)