Rise of the 'Food Delivery' Empire: How Wang Xing's Meituan Won the Cruelest 'Ground War' in History with 'Strong Execution'

Prologue: A "Harder" Battlefield

At a Meituan strategy meeting in late 2013, Wang Xing posed a question to all his senior executives:

"Group buying is a low-frequency consumption. How can we get users to open our app more frequently?"

The answer eventually pointed to a clear direction: food delivery.

Unlike "low-frequency" services like movie tickets and hotels, which might be used only once a month, eating is a daily necessity for everyone. This is a "high-frequency, essential-need" market, and the strongest "glue" connecting users and local merchants.

Wang Xing keenly realized that whoever could conquer the food delivery market would command the "high ground" of the entire O2O war.

However, this decision met with huge internal resistance at the time.

Because food delivery was a much "heavier" and "harder" business than group buying. It required not only online traffic and operations, but also the establishment of a large and efficient offline "delivery" team. This was a typical "dirty, tiring job," with thin profits and extremely complex management.

At that time, there was already a powerful, long-established player in the market—"Ele.me."

But Wang Xing went against the crowd. At his core, he was a "war" enthusiast. The more difficult and complex the battlefield, the more it ignited his fighting spirit.

"This battle must be fought!" Wang Xing said decisively at the meeting. "And once it starts, we must win first place in the country, at any cost!"

Act I: The Birth of the "Iron Army"

At the end of 2013, Meituan Waimai was officially launched. Wang Xing handpicked the most elite members from various departments of the company to form a "special forces" unit, personally led by his most trusted comrade, Wang Huiwen.

Wang Xing's first order to this team was not to seize the market, but to "study" war.

He required the team to study every food delivery app on the market and to review every tactic used by Ele.me. He even had the team study classic "battles" from history to learn about strategy and deployment.

Only after months of "war games" did Meituan's "ground promotion iron army" officially enter the battlefield.

Meituan's ground promotion team became feared throughout the industry for its powerful "execution" and "combat effectiveness."

They were like a well-disciplined army. Each ground promoter was equipped with a unified script and tools; they had the strictest KPI evaluations, with each team reporting the number of merchants signed and users acquired in the system every day; and they had the most "fierce" fighting will, willing to wait at a restaurant's entrance all day to sign an exclusive deal.

"Our ground promotion is sealed with cement. Every link is standardized and streamlined, leaving no gaps for competitors to exploit," said Gan Jiawei, then COO of Meituan, describing their system.

Act II: The "Pixel-Level" War

Faced with Meituan's aggressive advance, Ele.me launched its fiercest counterattack.

From 2014 to 2017, Meituan and Ele.me engaged in a "meat grinder" of a war in hundreds of cities across China.

The ferocity of the war was evident in every "pixel-level" detail.

In the university market, the ground promotion teams of both sides would even get into physical altercations to secure "exclusive agency rights" for a school.

On the merchant side, to persuade a restaurant to switch from Ele.me's system to Meituan's, the ground promoters would bring a computer and teach the restaurant owner how to use it, step by step.

On the user side, the subsidy war reached an "insane" level. If you offered a 5 yuan red envelope, I would offer an 8 yuan one. A 15 yuan lunch could end up costing the user only 1 yuan after applying various coupons.

Behind the scenes, it was another "proxy war" between Meituan (Tencent-backed) and Ele.me (Alibaba-backed). Tens of billions of capital were poured into this war.

However, in this "cash-burning" war, Wang Xing once again demonstrated his obsession with "efficiency."

He perfectly replicated the "data-driven management" system that had been proven in the "Thousand Groupon War" to the food delivery war. The "gross margin" of each region, the "per-person efficiency" of each rider, and the "delivery cost" of each order were all meticulously calculated and monitored.

While Ele.me was still using a more "brute-force" approach to conquer cities, Wang Xing's Meituan was already operating like a precision war machine, running with high efficiency.

Epilogue: The "Infinite War" with No Endgame

By 2018, this nearly five-year-long food delivery war finally had a phased winner.

With stronger financing capabilities and a more efficient operating system, Meituan Waimai gradually surpassed Ele.me in market share to become the industry "leader."

This victory firmly established Meituan's unshakable "hegemon" status in China's local life services sector. Food delivery, this "high-frequency" entry point, brought a continuous stream of users and cash flow to Meituan, providing the most solid "foundation" for its future expansion into more fields such as hotel and travel, ride-hailing, and retail.

Through this victory, Wang Xing once again proved to the world a core trait of his character:

He is a person with an unusual "love" and "patience" for "hard and tiring work." He can always choose the most difficult but correct battlefield, and win it in the "stupidest" and "heaviest" way.

However, Wang Xing himself never relaxed for a moment. He knew well that in the world of the internet, war never ends.

He defined Meituan's mission as "We help people eat better, live better." Under this "infinite" goal, the victory in the food delivery war was just a new beginning for Wang Xing's "infinite war."