How Alibaba’s Amap Beat Baidu Maps

And why Alibaba is now using it to challenge Meituan’s dominance in local commerce.

Amap - China’s Google maps

If you’re an investor in Alibaba or have traveled to China, you’ve probably come across Amap (高德地图, also known as Gaode). It’s a mapping and navigation app, basically Google Maps except it actually works in China.

Alibaba is now using Amap as a central weapon in its push into Meituan’s stronghold of instant retail and food delivery. It’s worth understanding how Amap fights and wins.

Founded in 2002, Amap started life as a boring enterprise mapping software company. The kind of business that makes money by selling map data to car manufacturers and government agencies.

By 2014, when Alibaba acquired Amap, the company was in deep trouble. Baidu Maps was destroying them.

When Baidu Was Actually Good at Something

Here’s the situation Amap faced in 2014: Baidu Maps had a staggering 65.2% market share. Amap? A pathetic 20.8%, less than a third of Baidu’s dominance.

Baidu had every advantage:

Search was the gateway to maps

In the PC era, people didn’t just open a map app, they searched for directions on Baidu, which helpfully funneled them straight to Baidu Maps. It was the perfect traffic funnel.

Baidu had money

Lots of it. It was still printing cash from search advertising, before deciding to diversify into, well, everything else it’s now mediocre at or has quietly abandoned. Back in those days, BAT actually meant Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent — not ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent. At the peak of that era, Baidu’s market cap was roughly on par with Alibaba’s. So Alibaba had to compete on equal terms and couldn’t simply outspend Baidu.

Network effects were already kicking in

More users meant better traffic data. Better traffic data meant more accurate routes. More accurate routes meant more users. The flywheel was spinning, and Amap was getting left behind.

In any rational analysis, Amap was done. You don’t come back from a 3:1 deficit against an entrenched leader with deep pockets and a built-in distribution advantage. Except... they did.

Enter Yu Yongfu: The Exception to Every Rule

When Alibaba completed the Amap acquisition, they needed someone to turn this around. They chose Yu Yongfu, who had just joined Alibaba through the UC Browser acquisition.

Here’s something you need to understand about Alibaba’s partnership structure: becoming an Alibaba Partner typically requires over five years at the company. It’s their equivalent of making partner at a law firm. It’s a big deal, lots of vetting, proof of loyalty and competence.

Yu Yongfu made partner in one year.

The only person to ever do this. Either Alibaba’s leadership completely lost their minds, or Yu Yongfu is genuinely exceptional. It was the latter.

How to Beat a Rich Competitor: Stop Playing Their Game

Despite Baidu’s huge percentage lead, the market for navigation was nowhere near saturated. The fight wasn’t just about stealing users; it was about capturing a vast wave of new users who had never used a mobile navigation app before. While Baidu assumed the race was already over, Yu saw that the track had only just been built.

He also realized that the shift from PC to mobile fundamentally altered how people used maps. On PC, you searched for directions. Baidu owned search, so they owned the entry point.

On mobile, you navigate in real-time. You’re in your car, or on your scooter, or walking to lunch, and you need turn-by-turn directions right now. Search isn’t the entry point anymore, the map app itself is.

This destroyed Baidu’s structural advantage. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that Baidu had the best search engine. Mobile users opened map apps directly. The playing field was level.

And Baidu, being Baidu, completely missed this shift. Baidu Maps was already in monetization mode, squeezing its existing user base long before the product was strong enough to lock in its advantage (the same pattern they repeated years later when they rushed to commercialize their Ernie bot)

At the same time, they began stuffing the app with O2O services that no one actually wanted inside a navigation interface, diluting focus and adding friction to the one task the product existed to perform.

Yu looked at them and said: fine, you do that. We’ll build the best navigation product in China.

First, he declared Amap wouldn’t monetize for three years.

He started by declaring that Amap would not monetize for three years. Let that sink in. You’re losing badly, your rival controls the market, everyone’s panicking about losses, and you tell the board you’ll make zero revenue for three more years. A bold career choice.

Second, he cut all the O2O nonsense.

Then he cut all the fluff. The mid-2010s were the golden age of Chinese super apps, when every company decided they had to do everything. Movie tickets, hotel bookings, food delivery, astrology if necessary. Baidu bought into the fad. Amap had tried it too. Yu killed it. He stripped Amap down to the essentials: navigation and maps. Nothing else. If you can’t guide a driver from A to B faster and safer than anyone else, why exist?

Third, he targeted the people who actually matter: professional drivers.

Most navigation apps chase the mass market—more users, better data, faster flywheel. Yu inverted the formula.

Professional drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, delivery couriers, ride-hailing drivers, use navigation constantly, often spending eight to twelve hours a day on the road. If Amap could win this group, it would gain the most valuable real-world traffic data, since these drivers cover far more ground than casual users.

It would also gain organic, high-frequency exposure, because every passenger sitting in a taxi or bus sees which navigation app is being used. And most importantly, professional drivers are the most demanding users of all; if you can build a product that satisfies people who navigate for a living, winning over everyday users becomes easy.

So Amap invested heavily in the features that professional drivers actually need. Better lane guidance. More accurate traffic data. Services to help drivers find bathrooms or cheap, good restaurants along their routes.

Cultural growth accelerant: celebrity voice packs

When Amap introduced voice navigation featuring Lin Chi-ling (台湾第一名模, basically the most famous model/actress in the Chinese-speaking world at the time), suddenly everyone wanted to try Amap. Downloads spiked. People actually switched apps just to have a celebrity voice give them directions.

Was this a sustainable competitive advantage? Of course not. But it got people in the door. And once they were in, they discovered that Amap’s navigation was actually... better.

The voice packs brought the users. The drivers brought the data. Together, they tipped the market.

The Compounding Power of Better Data

All of these decisions and insights were an overwhelming success. By 2016, Amap had overtaken Baidu Maps, and their market positions had essentially reversed. Baidu had fallen to a distant second.

Amap’s turnaround came from reversing the data flywheel. Once it won professional drivers, its real-time traffic data improved quickly, producing better routes, which attracted more users, which further improved the data. The loop that once favored Baidu now spun for Amap. Crucially, Amap kept investing heavily in data collection—lane-level mapping, live traffic feeds, POI accuracy, and integration with road systems—while Baidu cut back and tried to squeeze profits. By the time Baidu realized it needed to fix navigation quality, Amap’s data advantage was so large that catching up would have required years of sustained investment. The network effects and user habits were already locked in, and Baidu never regained ground.

From Navigation App to Super App (But Smartly This Time)

Remember how Yu Yongfu cut all the O2O features? That was true, for a while.

Once Amap had firmly established itself as the dominant navigation app, once the core was unquestionably better, they began adding services back. But this time, the expansion was deliberate, not frantic.

Ride-hailing integration came first: if you’re navigating somewhere, you may need a ride. This wasn’t a distraction—it was a natural extension of the navigation use case.

Then came travel bookings via Fliggy. If you’re planning a trip, you can book hotels and flights directly from Amap. But importantly, Amap didn’t try to build a travel service itself. It provided the traffic and discovery layer, while Fliggy handled the actual booking infrastructure and supply.

This division of roles was smart. Amap gained utility; Fliggy gained high-intent users. Both sides benefited.

The key point: Amap only expanded after it won the navigation war. It didn’t dilute focus or confuse the product’s identity. It built outward from a position of strength, not desperation.

Conclusion

The history of Amap is a masterclass in strategic focus. But the reason to study it now is that Alibaba is attempting to repeat the playbook, this time against Meituan.

Meituan’s position is formidable, built not just on a delivery app but on a decade of user-generated restaurant reviews on Dianping and a deeply integrated merchant supply chain infrastructure through Kuailv and a hyper-local logistics network. Alibaba isn’t just pushing Ele.me and Taobao to compete head-on. They are using Amap as the new point of entry. Recent feature rollouts are transforming Amap into a local discovery platform that overlaps directly with Dianping’s core territory. There are some interesting moves happening right now, which I’ll break down in more detail when I cover Alibaba’s next earnings.

The cycle repeats. Meituan has the lead, but the instant retail market is still growing. Alibaba appears to be executing the same playbook: grow the market, delay monetization, build the best product, and let the compounding effects of network and data take hold. Amap was once the underdog that overturned a dominant incumbent. Now, Alibaba is betting it can be the weapon to do it again. If it works is another question.