Chinese in One App To Rule Them All strategy

Fresh from a massive $4 billion funding round in October, Meituan-Dianping is using the concept of an all encompassing lifestyle app to take on the world.

Targets in its home market of China are obvious: Alibaba in the general e-commerce world and, specifically in travel, brands such as Ctrip in order to capture some of its own share of a lucrative market.

The $4 billion, Series C funding last month round brought in the likes of the Priceline Group and Chinese Internet service platform Tencent.

The round is said to have valued the company in the region of $30 billion, giving the seven-year-old brand a rather hefty war chest. The company claims to service more than 290 million users per month.

Meituan founder and CEO Wang Xing says the company is unafraid of the challenges presented by current competitor Alibaba.

And, he says, since the company is looking to expand its reach further into the travel and accommodation vertical, Meituan is likely to also ready to face down Chinese leader Ctrip.

The angle worth noting here is that, despite the competitive rhetoric from Meituan, Priceline Group's backing is perhaps another illustration of the U.S. company's desire to place its fingerprints over a number of likely dominant players in the Chinese market given its existing investment in Ctrip.

What is so different about the strategy in China being adopted by Meituan (and Alibaba) to elsewhere is the cross-vertical focus, with platforms positioning themselves to become lifestyle brands that give consumers travel products alongside everything else that they might need.

Only Amazon, briefly, has tried this.

“We believe these opportunities are big enough to generate an independent platform, but [it’s] probably not something ideal for Alibaba. We are not afraid of fighting with others if it’s part of our value creation process,” Xing tells The Information.

For its part, Todd Henrich, global head of corporate development of the Priceline Group, says: "Our commercial relationship between Agoda and Meituan-Dianping will help each company benefit from the other's expertise and capitalize on the opportunities presented by China's exceptionally large travel market."

It's a heady mix of products for Meituan - alongside cosmetics, consumers might find vacation or short-term apartment rentals, or ride-hailing services, as well as traditional travel booking tools.

In some respects, the ship may have sailed for a similar strategy back in the Priceline Group's home country and elsewhere, such as Europe.

Consumers are arguably settled into a routine of having distinct types of services (online travel agencies or metasearch) for travel, rather than a generalist, ecommerce company.

In China, where millions are plugging into the web for the first time, via a mobile device, having a brand that covers it all is a more natural evolution of the digital economy - it just happens to include travel.