What’s up with…? - Part 4: Douyin Local Services
An update on ‘the torturous trench war’ with Meituan
Introduction
In March last year, we wrote an in-depth article (Food Fight! Douyin’s local services business) about the way Bytedance’s Douyin short video app (TikTok’s Chinese sibling) had started to offer local services to its enormous reach of approximately 800 million Chinese users. After first incorporating e-commerce in the app, in-store group buying deals and even takeaway meals were a new way to monetize the app. As such, it has encroached on the territory of Meituan, which reacted by adding livestreams to its local services platform.
This update will describe what happened since we last wrote about it in March. Not only is it a perfect case showing how Chinese internet companies never stay ‘in their own corner’; it also shows us a possible future of TikTok, which in many ways is following the exact roadmap of Douyin.
This post is part 4 of our series on updates about some of our 2023 topics. Since some of these updates are shorter in size compared to our regular reports, we have temporarily switched to a weekly publication schedule. This post is a paid subscriber-only post.
Freya Zhang and Ed Sander, Research Editors
Rui Ma, Consulting Editor
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