[New Case Study] How did Meituan find business clarity in uncertain times?

In the past few years (and recently, in the last few months with Chat GPT evolution), many of our friends in the community – tech or otherwise – have asked us “My industry is evolving fast. Competition is no longer who we think they are. Are we innovating right, operating right and running in the right direction?”  

The Momentum Academy team have distill learnings from Meituan to create a case study to address this question. Titled Meituan: Finding business clarity, this  case study with the focus on how leaders find clarity in pivotal and challenging times. 

We link learnings from Meituan back to today’s organisations, answering the questions: 

1. When to persist (not change); and when to change (enter new business lines)? 
2. How to build and sharpen your core competencies?
3. How to align organization, people and product with the leadership to achieve strong execution

Download the case study here. 

1. Why Meituan 

Over the years, we’ve written a lot about Meituan on our TheLowDown. 

Meituan is one of the top 2nd generation giants (alongside ByteDance and Pinduoduo) in China today. It has evolved their business models multiple times, navigating a cut throat business environment and managing complicated terrains to be one of the largest tech companies in China. 

Some snippets from the case study:

1. Meituan’s beginning as a group buy company

How it faced the war of a thousand group buys  (including the Rocket Internet backed Groupon),  how intense the competition was back then to gain market share and how Meituan outlasted the competitors during the war of the thousand group buy companies.  

2. How did it pivot into the food delivery business despite being a late-comer?

3. Why did Meituan move into the food delivery space despite not having the in-depth knowledge ?

4. The importance of Meituan’s operation experience and ecosystem to its food delivery expansion 

Finally, we link the learnings from Meituan back to your organsisation through this case study series. 

Momentum Works and Momentum Academy teams have over the years uncovered insights on strategies and operations of some of the fastest growing companies (often in tech) that we have shared in our reports “Tech leaders with Chinese characteristics” here and “Who is Temu” (to be released this month). 

During the preparation of the book  “Seeing the Unseen: Beyond Tech Giants’ global venturing”, we had extensive chats with Jianggan and Guoli on how tech companies act through the lens of  leadership, people, organisation and product (the POP-Leadership framework). 

We hope these distilled learnings – through the Momentum Academy case study series  – will be helpful to anyone in a leadership position who is:

1. 1. expanding into a new business line;
   2. developing new products; 
   3. reassessing the organisation set-up; and/or 
   4. running full fledged operations.

Happy to discuss further on any of the pointers in the case study – you can download your complimentary copy here. 

You can also reach out to Momentum Academy at [email protected]