On 20 March 2025, Meituan, China’s market leader in food delivery and quick commerce, officially launched drone delivery service in Hong Kong.
At the launch ceremony, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee gave the takeoff command in person. Moments later, Meituan’s “Keeta” drone completed the city’s inaugural low-altitude logistics drop, landing a meal at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Keeta has published a video of the launch on its YouTube channel:
Beyond the PR moment, the launch signaled that regular drone deliveries in Hong Kong might be closer than many had assumed.
An Unlikely City for Drones – or Is It?
At first glance, Hong Kong might seem an unexpected choice for drone deliveries.
The city is famed for its dense urban skyline of skyscrapers and tightly packed streets, not the kind of open suburbs where drones typically (should) operate.
But that’s only part of the picture. Close to 60% of Hong Kong’s land area is actually covered with mountains, and the city has numerous populated islands.
Many popular delivery destinations in Hong Kong are hard to reach by scooter or bike. But they’re well within a drone’s range.
If drone delivery can succeed in Hong Kong’s complex landscape, it bodes well for many other cities with mixed urban and rural geographies.
A long game
The launch in Hong Kong is Meituan’s 54th commercial drone route, and the second for its global business Keeta (after the launch in UAE in December 2024).
In fact, Meituan’s drone delivery isn’t a sudden moonshot – it’s been years in the making.
The company established its drone delivery unit back in 2017 and has been refining the technology through several generations of drones.
By 2019, it built its first generation of delivery drones. In 2020, it ran small-scale tests (including that one viral moment where a drone delivered bubble tea).
A year later, it made its first real customer delivery in Shenzhen – quietly, without a lot of fanfare.
Parallel to hardware and software development, Meituan has been busy testing the service at scale. Over the past few years, the company opened 53 drone delivery routes across Chinese cities including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Nanjing.
These pilot routes focused on specific use cases – office parks, residential communities, tourist attractions, university campuses, even border checkpoints – to refine the system under different conditions.
By the end of 2024, Meituan’s drones had completed more than 450,000 delivery orders in China. This is a very small percentage compared to Meituan’s 70 million deliveries completely daily, but nonetheless non-trivial in testing a new service.
Meituan’s drone initiative is also expanding beyond China. On 17 Dec 2024, Dubai’s Civil Aviation Authority granted Meituan’s drone unit a certificate for beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) commercial drone delivery – the first such license ever issued in that region.
For sure Meituan would like to deepen the penetration of Keeta drones in Hong Kong and UAE, but also explore more commercial use cases alongside its international expansion.
Conclusion
In the tech industry, it’s well known that futuristic projects like drone delivery often falter due to wavering commitment or shifting priorities. Building a new logistics infrastructure from scratch is expensive and may take years to pay off, a hard sell for firms focused on quick profits.
Many companies scaled back or redirected their drone efforts when faced with technical hurdles and regulatory delays.
Meituan, however, has backed its drone ambitions with consistent investment, deliberate rollout, and years of technical iteration.
More importantly, this hasn’t just been a corporate project—it’s had executive-level buy-in from the start.
CEO Wang Xing has personally championed the programme and, in a recent reorganisation, moved the drone team to report directly to him.
That’s the bet. Meituan’s core delivery network is already highly optimized. Further gains from traditional couriers will likely be incremental.
But autonomous drones could break through that ceiling.
