Is Meituan a technology company? At least according to Meituan founder Wang Xing, the answer is yes. In the past 52 weeks, Meituan’s share price has risen from a low of HK$85.3 to HK$460, and its market value has reached nearly HK$3 trillion. It was once second only to Tencent and Alibaba, and once ranked third among Chinese Internet companies. But is Meituan really a technology company? If compared with foreign companies such as Tesla and Google, Meituan is obviously not an excellent technology company.
It suffered a loss of 6 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, half of which came from community group buying and the other half from new business
On March 26, 2021, Meituan released its Q4 and full-year financial reports for 2020. According to official data, in Q4 2020, Meituan had revenue of 37.9 billion yuan and a loss of 1.44 billion yuan (a profit of 2.27 billion yuan in the same period last year). The full-year revenue in 2020 is 114.79 billion yuan (market estimate is 113.95 billion yuan), and the net profit is 4.71 billion yuan (2.239 billion yuan in the same period last year, the market estimate is 5.61 billion yuan). Meituan’s report card in 2020 can be described as mixed.
The good news is that Meituan’s revenue exceeded 100 billion yuan for the first time, which is an amazing achievement for a local lifestyle company. Among them, food delivery accounts for 57.76% - annual revenue of 66.3 billion yuan (fourth quarter revenue of 21.54 billion yuan); in-store, hotel and tourism business revenue of 21.3 billion yuan; new business and other segment revenue of 27.3 billion yuan Yuan.
But what is worrying is that Meituan’s profits have narrowed in 2020, especially the losses in Q4 last year that expanded. Meituan's operating loss in 2020 expanded from 6.7 billion yuan in 2019 to 10.9 billion yuan in 2020. In the fourth quarter of last year, Meituan’s losses reached a staggering 6 billion yuan.
Especially in community group buying, Wang Xing said, "A loss of about 6 billion was generated in the fourth quarter, half of which came from Meituan Select and the other half from other new businesses."
< p> Moreover, such losses will continue for a long time. To this end, Meituan issued an announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to remind: Because it is vigorously developing its community e-commerce business, it may continue to lose money in the next few quarters.But Wang Xing is very confident about this new business. "Meituan Select, as a community e-commerce business, may be the best opportunity that comes once in 5 or even 10 years."
Why is Wang Xing so confident? As a giant with more than 200 billion US dollars, its core business has come from the continuous growth of new businesses since its establishment. Meituan, which was born in 2010, started from the group buying business and fought its way out after experiencing the brutal war of "Thousands of Groups War". Since 2016, group buying is no longer the company's main source of income.
Today, Meituan’s main revenue sources are divided into three major businesses. The first is the food delivery business, which is mainly Meituan Takeaway (founded in 2013), which currently accounts for nearly 60% of Meituan’s revenue; The second part is the business focusing on hotels, travel (the business unit was established in 2017) and in-store services. The third part is the new business (gradually expanding from 2019), which includes online ride-hailing, shared bicycles and The current Meituan Selection and other businesses.
It is not difficult to find that Meituan is an Internet giant that has been constantly iterating new businesses. From group buying to food delivery, to wine travel and online ride-hailing, Meituan has been broadening its boundaries to realize the company's goals. The market value continues to rise. Therefore, bold attempts at new businesses are the direction that Wang Xing and Meituan are constantly pursuing. Even in the face of huge losses, Meituan still does not hesitate to invest.
Wang Xing believes that Meituan is a technology company for three reasons.
So, back to the issue discussed today, is Meituan, which has no boundaries, a technology company?
At least in Wang Xing’s eyes, Meituan is a technology company. “I have always believed that Meituan is a technology company. Although it is not a technology company in the pure sense, our business is indeed driven by technology. ".
In this regard, the reasons given by Wang Xing can be summarized into three points:
First of all, Wang Xing believes that the logic of Meituan as a technology company is that “business depends on "Technology-driven", therefore, even though Meituan may appear to be a platform for food delivery and hotel booking, "the ultimate goal is to serve human life";
Secondly, "Meituan has the largest number of engineers in China" One of several companies in the team, the company currently has more than 10,000 engineers";
Third, in terms of technology application, Meituan has "carried out a long period of research and development of fully automatic delivery products" and "tested "Drone delivery", and has invested in many robotics companies, new energy vehicle companies, and is very interested in biotechnology and agricultural technology.
Judging from Wang Xing’s three-point logic, judging from the company’s dreams, employee composition ratio and practical applications, Meituan should be a technology company. But there is no harm without comparison. What is the essence of a technology company? A technology company is not what it thinks it is, but depends on how the outside world evaluates it, which may be more illustrative.
What kind of company can be called an excellent technology company: at least it does not live to scheme against hawkers.
What kind of company can be called a technology company? It may be more appropriate for us to demonstrate one by one based on its definition, authoritative ranking lists, and the performance of other outstanding companies.
First of all, as for the definition of "technology company" or "technology enterprise", both domestic Baidu Encyclopedia and foreign Weiji Encyclopedia have given very clear explanations.
Baidu Encyclopedia believes that "the products have relatively high technical content, have core competitiveness, can continuously launch new marketable products, and continuously expand the market." Technology companies are mainly divided into two categories. Brother Value has looked at the classification. If Meituan is classified as a technology company, it belongs to the second category.
Weiji Encyclopedia’s explanation of technology companies is more concise and concise, similar to Baidu Encyclopedia. Therefore, it seems that from the interpretation of "technology company", Meituan meets the meaning of "technology company". But this is not the case.
Second, according to the analysis of rankings of technology companies by foreign authoritative institutions, Meituan is not included in the ranks of technology companies. The list of the world's top 500 companies from the American magazine "Fortune" shows that Meituan is not among the world's largest technology companies. Chinese technology companies selected for this list include Foxconn, Huawei, Tencent, Lenovo, Xiaomi and other companies (data as of March 31, 2020).
So some netizens may ask, maybe Meituan was not selected because of its income, rather than because it is not a technology company?
Let’s look at the other two lists. In Forbes magazine’s global Internet company rankings and global software company rankings, Meituan was selected for both lists, ranking 17th in both lists.
Therefore, from our foreign rankings, Meituan is classified as an Internet company or software company, not a technology company.
Third, what are the excellent technology companies? What is the difference between Meituan and them? This was a hotly discussed topic some time ago - the gap between Chinese and foreign technology companies.
At the end of December last year, Li Guoqing, the founder of Dangdang.com, reposted a picture, "Musk is turning the fantasy of the future world into reality step by step, while domestic Internet giants are busy robbing community vendors. "jobs", this seems to show that the goals pursued by Chinese and foreign Internet or technology companies are really not consistent.
Compared with foreign technology companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, they are changing our energy, transportation, Internet access and future living space issues; Google has given birth to self-driving companies such as waymo through the Google X laboratory. Through products such as Google's hot air balloon, it has been persisting in solving people's problem of free Internet access for 9 years; Amazon has become the world's number one in cloud computing, deploying unmanned supermarkets, space exploration, etc.; Apple is trying to use AR technology to provide services on smartphones and headsets. It achieved a breakthrough in wearing display equipment and entered the field of car manufacturing at the beginning of this year.
On the contrary, "technology companies" around us such as Meituan are eyeing community e-commerce as their biggest goal in the next 10 years, and other domestic companies are also trying to get more people addicted In games, live broadcasts, and even agents of false medical advertisements, fighting opponents to the death. This has to be said to be a sad phenomenon. The road to becoming a powerful country through science and technology seems to have never had anything to do with these giants.
Even if we think that Meituan is a technology company, compared with foreign technology companies such as Tesla, Google and Amazon, it is not that good.
Google X once believed that "if you can't afford failure, you can't afford excellence." For such a dream, this technology giant did not hesitate to fail as many as 100 projects and invest tens of billions of dollars. Bezos gave up being CEO of Amazon to invest in space exploration. They make us believe that technology companies are born to change the world, but some "technology companies" are still living as calculation hawkers.