Meituan Announces 2018 Fourth Quarter and Annual Results

HONG KONG, March 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Meituan (HKG: 3690) (the "Company"), China's leading e-commerce platform for services, today announced the unaudited consolidated results for the fourth quarter of 2018 ("4Q2018") and the audited consolidated results for the year ended December 31, 2018 ("FY2018").

FY2018 Key Highlights

In the year ended December 31, 2018:

Financial Performance Highlights:

• Total revenues increased by 92.3% year-over-year to RMB65.2 billion from RMB33.9 billion in 2017. We achieved strong revenue growth across all major business segments.
• Total gross profit increased to RMB15.1 billion year-over-year from RMB12.2 billion in 2017. We continued to make gross margin improvement in our core businesses such as food delivery and in-store, hotel & travel.
• Selling and marketing expenses as a percentage of total revenues decreased to 24.3% from 32.2% in 2017, attributable to economies of scale, our stronger brands and healthy operating leverage.
• Negative adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net loss were RMB4.7 billion and RMB8.5 billion, respectively. Our negative adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net loss continue to narrow sequentially on a quarter-over-quarter basis in the fourth quarter of 2018.
• Our food delivery segment and in-store, hotel & travel segment on a combined basis generated positive adjusted operating profit^[1] in 2018.

Operating Highlights:

• Total Gross Transaction Volume (GTV) on our platform grew by 44.3% to RMB515.6 billion in 2018 from RMB357.2 billion in 2017.
• Annual Transacting Users on our platform grew by 29.3% to 400.4 million in 2018 from 309.5 million in 2017. On average, the annual number of transactions each Transacting User made on our platform increased to 23.8 transactions in 2018 from 18.8 transactions in 2017.
• Annual Active Merchants on our platform grew by 32.1% to 5.8 million in 2018 from 4.4 million in 2017.
• Overall monetization rate^[2] increased to 12.6% in 2018 from 9.5% in 2017.

4Q2018 Key Highlights

• Total revenue for the fourth quarter 2018 reached RMB19.8 billion, up 89.0% year over year.
• Total gross profit for the fourth quarter 2018 increased to RMB4.5 billion, up 33.7% year over year.
• Selling and marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue in the fourth quarter 2018 further decreased to 22.9%.
• Adjusted EBITDA loss and adjusted net loss in fourth quarter 2018 were RMB854.6 million and RMB1.86 billion, respectively.
• The GTV in the fourth quarter 2018 increased to RMB138.0 billion, up 32.5% year over year.

"Focusing on our 'Food + Platform' strategy and continuing to add value to our one-stop services platform, we have achieved fast growth in our businesses and further solidified our market leadership position in 2018," said Wang Xing, founder and CEO of Meituan. "In the next stage of internet industry competition, the combination of online and offline will create more opportunities. With our mission to help people eat better, live better, we will continue to drive supply side digitalization with technology innovation, and to empower merchants to gain more growth momentum."

Company Business Review

Food delivery

In 2018, our food delivery business sustained its strong growth momentum. The daily average number of food delivery transactions increased by 56.3% to RMB17.5 million in 2018 from 11.2 million in 2017. GTV of our food delivery business increased by 65.3% to RMB282.8 billion in 2018 from RMB171.1 billion in 2017. Revenue from food delivery increased by 81.4% year-over-year to RMB38.1 billion.

As the world's largest food delivery service provider, we further cemented our market-leading position during 2018. On the consumer front, through creating more diversified service categories, consumption scenarios and upgrading marketing programs, we increased users' transaction frequency and further boosted transaction volume growth. We continued to expand the service categories on our platform to include breakfasts, afternoon tea and midnight snacks. Delivery volume of fast food, snacks, desserts and drinks achieved strong growth during 2018. On the merchant front, we continued to help restaurants reach new target customers, access substantial new consumption demand and enable merchants to improve their operational efficiencies.

We have been continuously optimizing the algorithms of our intelligent order dispatching system to further improve delivery efficiency, and enhancing the training and management of our delivery riders to ensure the consistency of our industry-leading service quality while fulfilling the fast-growing number of food delivery orders.

In-store, hotel & travel

Our in-store, hotel & travel businesses continued to solidify its market leadership and further

demonstrated strong monetization capability in 2018. While the GTV of in-store, hotel & travel businesses grew by 11.8% to RMB176.8 billion in 2018 from RMB158.1 billion in 2017, the monetization rate increased to 9.0% from 6.9%, which was primarily due to the increasing contribution of online marketing revenue. As a result, revenues from in-store, hotel & travel businesses in 2018 increased by 46.0% to RMB15.8 billion in 2018 from RMB10.9 billion in 2017. Gross profit from in-store, hotel & travel businesses increased to RMB14.1 billion in 2018 from RMB9.6 billion in 2017, while the gross margin expanded to 89.0% from 88.3%.

Online marketing services revenue contributed a more significant portion of revenues of our in-store business in 2018, driven by the increasing number of online marketing Active Merchants. In particular, advertising revenues generated from beauty, vocational training, parenting, and leisure and entertainment increased by over 60% year-over-year in 2018.

We further solidified the leading position of our hotel booking business in 2018. Domestic room nights consumed increased by 38.5% to 283.9 million in 2018 from 205.0 million in 2017, while average daily rate per room night experienced a steady increase year-over-year. We have also been strengthening the synergy between our hotel booking and other in-store businesses. Through cross-selling dining services, wedding planning services, spa, gyms and others services, we were able to help hotels further substantiate their revenue streams from non-lodging services.

New initiatives and others

GTV from the new initiatives and others segment increased by 99.8% to RMB56.0 billion in 2018 from RMB28.0 billion in 2017. Revenues from the new initiatives and others segment increased by 450.3% to RMB11.2 billion in 2018 from RMB2.0 billion in 2017. Gross margin of the new initiatives and others segment was negative 37.9% in 2018, compared with positive 46.0% in 2017.

In 2018, we stepped up our investment in our Restaurant Management System (RMS) and supply chain solutions, through which we can strengthen relationship with the merchants on our platform, improve their operational efficiency, and explore additional monetization opportunities in the food service value chain. Our RMS is revolutionizing the restaurant software industry with a SaaS model.

We launched our pilot car-hailing services in Nanjing and Shanghai to increase high-frequency services on our platform. Since the acquisition of Mobike in April 2018, we have been leveraging our offline operation experience and capabilities to increase the operational efficiency of Mobike and reduce its operating losses. We also have started to integrate Mobike's operations into our platform. We have implemented organizational realignments and integrated operation to improve management efficiency. In order to better direct offline traffic to our online platform, we have added the portal to unlock the bikes in Meituan app to gradually cultivate the users to use Meituan app as the sole entry point to access our bike sharing services.

Company Outlook and Strategies for 2019

In 2019, we will continue executing our "Food + Platform" strategy. While maintaining the market leadership of our food delivery business, we also seek to further improve our platform's monetization capabilities, prudently explore new initiatives, and continually enhance the strategic synergies between our new initiatives and our core businesses.

• Overall, we strive to further strengthen our self-reinforcing ecosystem with frequent users and merchant base to achieve stronger economy of scale and network effect. We will focus on further growing the number of both Transacting Users and Active Merchants, increasing our Transacting Users' purchase frequency and stickiness, and enhancing our high-frequency users' loyalty to our platform.
• For our food delivery business, we will continue to solidify our leading position and market share while maintaining our competitive advantages in operating efficiency and unit economics.
• For our in-store business, we plan to further improve monetization capabilities by expanding service categories, deepening merchant penetration and increasing the adoption of diversified marketing solutions.
• We will take a more disciplined approach when allocating capital resources for our new initiatives and be more selective in scaling up new initiatives. We will improve the operational efficiencies and significantly narrow the operating losses of both our car-hailing and bike-sharing businesses, and strengthen their strategic synergies with the overall platform. We will continue the development of our RMS and supply chain solutions, focusing on the quality of the merchants that we serve rather than just the volume growth. We will prudently explore the opportunities in new retail area such as non-food delivery.

For the full announcement of Meituan 2018 annual results, please visit: http://meituan.todayir.com/attachment/2019031118150200003422038_en.pdf

About Meituan

Meituan (HKG: 3690) (the "Company") is China's leading e-commerce platform for services. With the mission of "We help people eat better, live better," the Company's platform uses technology to connect consumers and merchants. Service offerings on the platform address people's daily needs for food, and extend further to broad lifestyle and travel services. According to the iResearch Report, Meituan is the world's largest on-demand food delivery service provider and China's largest e-commerce platform for in-store dining services in 2017. It currently operates the world's largest on-demand delivery network in terms of the number of deliveries in 2017. Meituan helps consumers discover merchant information, make informed decisions, complete online and offline transactions and enjoy on-demand delivery. The Company currently owns several household brands in China, including Meituan, China' s leading online marketplace for services by GTV in 2017, Dianping, China' s leading online destination for discovering lifestyle services by MAU in 2017, Meituan Waimai for on-demand delivery services, and Mobike for bike-sharing services. Meituan had 382.3 million Annual Transacting Users and 5.5 million Annual Active Merchants by the end of third quarter 2018. The Company operates in over 2,800 cities and counties in China.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to the business outlook, forecast business plans and growth strategies of the Company. These forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to the Company and are stated herein on the basis of the outlook at the time of this press release. They are based on certain expectations, assumptions and premises, some of which are subjective or beyond our control. These forward-looking statements may prove to be incorrect and may not be realised in future. Underlying the forward-looking statements is a large number of risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these risks and uncertainties is included in our other public disclosure documents on our corporate website.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Meituan
pr@meituan.com
ir@meituan.com

Edmond Lococo
ICR Inc.
Email: edmond.lococo@icrinc.com
Tel: +86 (10) 6583 7510

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