China’s Food Delivery War: Meituan, Alibaba, JD, and the Physics of Scale

Meituan, Alibaba, and JD.com are burning billions in China’s instant retail battle — but scale, density, and cross-selling will decide who survives.

Meituan Ruled, JD Preached, Alibaba Brought the Pain

If you want the short version of China’s instant retail war so far, it goes like this:

Meituan ruled. JD pulled the moral card. Alibaba said, “hold my beer,” and lit the voucher fuse.

For years, Meituan owned food delivery. Ele.me was a distant, loss-making second. Then JD marched in with no infrastructure, no riders, no experience — just grand speeches about being “nicer” to drivers and restaurants, paying social security. It was moral theater with nothing to show for it. Wait did I say nothing to show for? They did manage to make all their earnings disappear.

Alibaba, meanwhile, did the grown-up thing. Instead of whining about fairness, they competed — on price, on service quality, on scale. Ele.me got wired in as the local backbone of Taobao Flash Buy. And now, with AMap, they’re aiming at Dianping — a vastly under-discussed app that is one of the biggest cornerstones of Meituan’s moat in offline discovery.

The result so far: three companies bleeding cash, one very entertained consumer base (free coffee, free drinks, thank you very much), and headlines reduced to a single lazy line: “everyone’s losing money.”

In this article, I’ll go deeper — into the mechanics, the ecosystem plays, and the cracks that don’t make the press releases.