Wang Xing, founder and CEO of Meituan, spent a large part of the company’s June 26, 2026 annual general meeting doing something Chinese tech founders rarely do in public: naming his own mistakes out loud. “The stock price has been unsatisfactory in the past few years, and I feel a great sense of responsibility,” he told shareholders, before laying out two specific strategic errors he said the company had made over the previous five years — a rare degree of direct self-criticism from a founder whose company had just posted its first annual net loss since 2022.
A Price War That Turned a Profit Into a Loss
The context for Wang’s admission was stark. Meituan’s full-year 2025 results showed a net loss of 23.4 billion yuan, a sharp reversal from the 35.8 billion yuan profit the company posted in 2024, even as revenue grew 8.1% to 364.9 billion yuan. The cause was an instant-retail and food-delivery subsidy war that Meituan did not start but could not avoid: JD.com formally entered food delivery in February 2025 and launched a 100-billion-yuan subsidy campaign that April, while Alibaba rebranded Ele.me as Taobao Flash Delivery and announced its own 50-billion-yuan subsidy push that July. By Wang’s own count at the June AGM, roughly 200 billion yuan had been poured into the fight across the industry within a single year of what he called “very crazy competition.” China’s State Administration for Market Regulation flagged the price war as a top-ten “involutionary competition” enforcement priority in late January 2026 and summoned the platforms again on February 13, part of a broader regulatory push to rein in the subsidy spending.
Two Mistakes, Named Directly
Wang identified the first mistake as expanding internationally too late. Meituan, he said, should have moved overseas around 2018-2019, missing a window when the pandemic drove a surge in overseas food-delivery adoption that competitors captured first. The second was Meituan Select, the company’s community group-buying business, which Wang said failed because its model pushed non-standardized products into a race toward whichever seller offered the absolute lowest price — a dynamic that consumed significant investment without producing the results the company had expected. He paired the admissions with a personal commitment: “I have not sold a single share since the company was founded, and I have no plan to sell my shares,” and signaled a shift toward more disciplined capital allocation going forward, saying any future major investment in an unclear business direction would be made “more rationally and with financial discipline.”
Layoffs, an AI Pivot, and Early Signs of Recovery
The financial strain showed up operationally well before the AGM. Meituan began layoffs in early May 2026 — affecting fewer than 2,000 of its roughly 110,000 employees, but described internally as the largest personnel adjustment in recent years, with some teams inside in-store group buying, commercialization, and the Meituan Instashopping unit seeing headcount cuts of 20% to 40%. At the same time, the Core Local Commerce division stood up a new AI Transformation department, and Meituan pushed forward with LongCat-2.0-Preview, a trillion-parameter AI model that entered open testing in 2026, alongside an AI shopping assistant called Xiao Tuan that the company said served more than 100 million users during the May Day holiday period alone. There were early signs the worst of the financial damage was passing: first-quarter 2026 revenue reached 91 billion yuan, up 5.6% year-over-year, with the company’s net loss narrowing by nearly 10 billion yuan compared with the prior quarter.
A More Cautious Global Push
Wang used a separate March 2026 statement to draw a clear line under how Meituan would approach international markets going forward, urging “focused” global expansion and explicitly warning against “blind” pushes into new territory — a comment aimed in part at Brazil, one of Meituan’s newest and least-proven markets. The company’s Saudi Arabia delivery service, KeeTa, was cited as the more disciplined model: an operation expected to turn profitable rather than one built purely for market-share growth. Meituan’s balance sheet also carries a sizable, less-publicized cushion against the core business’s volatility — as of March 31, 2026, the company held equity stakes in Li Auto (12.73%), Zhipu AI (3.86%), and Unitree Robotics (7.61%), a portfolio worth more than 50 billion yuan.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Meituan’s 2025 loss is a concrete data point for any Philippine food-delivery or quick-commerce founder weighing whether to chase a rival’s subsidy war rather than sit it out: even the dominant incumbent in the world’s largest food-delivery market, with roughly 70% share, saw a 35.8-billion-yuan profit erased in a single year once two well-capitalized competitors decided to fight on price rather than product. Wang’s public admission that Meituan Select failed specifically because non-standardized goods invite a race to the lowest price is directly relevant to any local grocery, sari-sari, or wet-market delivery startup considering a similar community group-buying model — the mechanism that broke it in China (undifferentiated products, pure price competition) is not unique to that market. And his stated regret over delaying overseas expansion until competitors moved first is a useful counter-signal for Philippine startups eyeing Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern expansion: the lesson from Meituan’s own founder is that moving early and disciplined beats moving late and defensive, but moving “blindly,” as Wang put it about Brazil, is its own trap.
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