Meituan has had a hard year. Its shares are down more than 37% year-to-date; on 25 June they hit HK$64.75, about 6% below the HK$69 IPO price from September 2018.
That was the backdrop to the company’s annual shareholder meeting on 26 June. According to our contacts who were at the meeting, founder Wang Xing was unusually candid. He said he felt deeply responsible for the share price – and noted that he has not sold a single share since founding Meituan in 2010.
You can read the transcript of the meeting here.
When asked what mistakes Meituan had made over the past five years, one of the regrets Wang Xing admitted stood out to us:
“What we should have done but did not do: go overseas earlier.“
(The other one was the five year investment into community group buy – Meituan Select – which eventually lost out to Pinduoduo’s Duoduo Maicaii).
The regret is timing
What caught our attention was that Wang Xing emphasised that the mistake was the timing. The window he had in mind was pre-pandemic – specifically 2018-2019.
In a way, having the right infrastructure in place would allow a player to ride the wave of surging demand during covid.
His original words:
First, what we should have done but did not do: go overseas earlier. Looking back, perhaps we should have gone overseas earlier, especially before the pandemic, at the end of 2018 or in 2019. During the two years of the pandemic, foreign penetration rates rose rapidly, and we missed the stage when foreign penetration rates increased quickly during the pandemic.
We know that Meituan started planning global expansion in 2018 if not earlier – but they did not pull the trigger until 2023.
They started in Hong Kong, right across the river Shenzhen, one of China’s largest cities. Meituan then expanded into Saudi Arabia in 2024 and subsequently other GCC countries (UAE, Qatar, Kuwait & Bahrain) in quick succession.
Their most recent foray was in October 2025, when they started operations in Brazil. Although that proved a much tougher market to crack into.
So the regret is not that it never tried. It is that it waited. Which makes the admission more pointed, not less.
Organisational caution may be the cause
We think the main cause is – organisational caution.
Meituan is famous for their detailed, thorough planning. Any new major initiative was debated over and over, with the managers having justified every logical link, before the investment decision was ever made.
They took the Amazon organisational playbook very seriously – every meeting with managers starts with (silent) reading memos prepared beforehand. Comments are made before an open discussion. This creates high efficiency, and allows the organisation to distill knowledge systematically from the ground.
However, this can also cause them to be overly cautious in launching new major initiatives. Overseas expansion was one of them.
Meituan’s leadership and culture were documented extensively in our book Seeing the Unseen: Behind Chinese Tech Giants’ Global Venturing. In a way this is also a predictable pattern. Leaders are so focused on growing and protecting the large home market, that they often do not have the mind space for the new overseas expansion.
And when they use the same play overseas, the results will vary.
What’s next for Meituan
Which leaves the question Meituan needs to consider: If you have already missed the best window, what do you do? Conclude the opportunity has passed – or double down precisely because it now matters more?
Wang Xing has repeatedly said they are still serious about expanding overseas. In his own words “Overall, overseas we will continue to invest steadily and carefully”.
We think he is serious when he says he is serious.
Note: Meituan’s Hong Kong expansion is well covered in our first Food delivery in East Asia report, which will be released next week.
