Recently, Meituan exhibited a number of technology products including automatic delivery vehicles, drones, smart restaurants, smart pharmacies, etc. at the 2022 Global Digital Conference. Chen Rongkai, vice president of Meituan, said that Meituan is deeply engaged in the main retail track, and technology innovation is the core driver. He also said that under the “Retail + Technology” strategy, Meituan hopes to rapidly promote the efficiency of goods and services retailing based on technological innovation in more than 200 open scenarios, which can better meet the diverse needs of Chinese consumers and help more physical businesses better integrate into the digital economy.
In recent years, users “the fastest 30 minutes everything to home” has become a common demand, so the automatic delivery vehicles, drones, 24 small wisdom pharmacies and so on are exhibited by Meituan at the conference site. Among them, the 24-hour wisdom pharmacy through visual recognition, automation control and other technologies helps businesses solve the problem of 24-hour pharmacy operation.
In terms of fruit delivery, the standard delivery service of “3 km and 15 minutes” by Meituan’s drone on display can significantly shorten the delivery time. As of June 2022, Meituan drones have landed in four business districts in Shenzhen, with delivery capacity covering more than 10 communities and office buildings, serving nearly 20,000 households and over 58,000 orders for real users. At present, Meituan drone delivery has reached cooperation with dozens of brands in different categories such as meals, beverages and fresh fruits.
The person in charge of Meituan said that Meituan is focused on investing technology research and development into more than 200 livelihood service scenarios to improve retail efficiency in order to better serve the real economy. According to the 2022 Q1 financial report, Meituan invested 4.9 billion yuan on technology research and development, an increase of 40% compared with last year.
In addition, at the site of this 2022 Global Digital Economy Conference, Meituan also demonstrated for the first time to the public the Life Services Overview Big Data System. The system is based on Meituan’s consumption data and practice accumulation in the field of life services, through the observation of food and beverage, entertainment and other urban consumption, the data will be visualized, so that you can see the general overview of life services in the query city, in order to assist the government or relevant departments to understand the changes in online consumption and supply of life services in real-time.
