Author | Liu Baodan From performance to market confidence, Meituan is walking out of a three-year low point, but Wang Xing is not stopping there - he has even bigger plans. Going overseas has become a must for Chinese companies. Meituan, which has been warming up for 8 years, has finally made up its mind to put going overseas on the agenda. Recently, Meituan began recruiting senior engineers for international silver enterprise direct connection. After the model was successful in the Hong Kong market, Meituan officially kicked off its overseas expansion, accelerated recruitment and put the first stop of the overseas expansion in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Going overseas is a critical turning point, which means that after more than ten years of capacity accumulation, Meituan has to export its local life capabilities to the world, which is as significant as the replication of TikTok by ByteDance. In the wave of Internet companies going overseas, Meituan went overseas later because local life patterns are more important than social, e-commerce and other industries. However, Wang Xing must make this move. Against the background of intensified domestic competition and the shrinking of community group buying, he must find a new growth story. On his entrepreneurial journey, Wang Xing is still determined to create a new business legend in this global adventure. A must-have question. Meituan has fought a beautiful takeaway battle in Hong Kong. On May 6, Measurable AI, a market research firm, released the latest data showing that by March 2024, according to the number of orders, KeeTa, the takeaway business of Meituan in Hong Kong, has a market share of 44%, rising to the largest takeaway platform in Hong Kong. However, Hong Kong is only a stopover for Meituan's overseas expansion, and Meituan has set its real meaning of going overseas in Saudi Arabia. Wall Street news learned that Meituan has been recruiting people around the direction of going overseas in the past two months. The positions include engineers, overseas human resources and operation experts, international payment and transaction product managers, mainly responsible for payments, employee management and related products in overseas markets. More importantly, the recruitment of local talents. More than a month ago, Meituan posted relevant recruitment information on LinkedIn and the Middle East recruitment platform Baye.com, with Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, as the place of work. From the city selection, Meituan did not choose the United States with a larger market space, nor did it choose Southeast Asia where culture and food are more similar, but chose Saudi Arabia. It can be seen that Meituan's overseas expansion strategy still has a heavy experimental component and is more cautious. Wang Xing is not fighting an unprepared battle. For this overseas expansion, Meituan has been planning for many years. As early as 2016, Wang Xing began to consider the issue of going overseas and visited Silicon Valley, Berlin, Israel, Jakarta and other places. In 2017, Meituan officially laid out overseas accommodation business, first connecting hotels in nearly 100 countries overseas to the Meituan application. At that time, the domestic and foreign takeaway wars were in full swing, and with Meituan's listing in Hong Kong in 2018, Wang Xing's overseas strategy was forced to be shelved. Since then, Meituan has also made a series of international investments, including Swiggy in India, Gojek in Indonesia, and Opay in Nigeria, involving food, taxis, payments and other fields, to prepare for going overseas. Along with the frequent news reports of Meituan's victory in Hong Kong, Meituan's overseas plan was finally brought to an unprecedented strategic height in 2024, and Wang Xing once again rushed to the forefront. In February, Meituan put the home business group, the in-store business group and other businesses into the core local business sector, and appointed Wang Putong as CEO, while Wang Xing personally took charge of overseas business, which ensured the landing of the overseas expansion strategy in the organizational structure. In fact, before the confirmation of the overseas expansion strategy, Wang Xing personally visited the Middle East last May and met with members of the Saudi royal family, laying the foundation for Meituan's layout in Saudi Arabia.

In today's weather is good. Today's weather is good.

After successfully entering the live-streaming e-commerce track, the problems of Dongfang Zhenxuan began to concentrate and erupt again, and Yu Minhong once again fell into trouble.

On July 9th, Yu Minhong's Douyin account showed that the anti-disturbance protection function was enabled, allowing only friends to comment.

Dong Yuhui's red-hot popularity was unexpected. Although he saved Dongfang Zhenxuan, he could not change Yu Minhong's path selection for Dongfang Zhenxuan. For Yu Minhong, neither his own nor the anchors under his company want to be controlled by netizens.

What Dongfang Zhenxuan is always trying to be is a product technology company, a cultural communication company, rather than relying on large anchor MCN institutions. This choice inevitably means that Dongfang Zhenxuan will suffer from the backlash of the traffic in the transformation process.

In the past period of time, Dongfang Zhenxuan frequently made headlines and experienced two major crises of speech.

The first wave was at the beginning of June. Yu Minhong first stated in Zhang Wenzhong's live broadcast that Dongfang Zhenxuan was also messed up now and had received a lot of negative comments, and he was ready to stay away from the business circle. Similarly, Dong Yuhui expressed his strong opposition to selling things in an interview program called "I Love Myself and It's Great".

The second wave was at the end of June. First, when the anchor Shi Ming explained the terrain of Guizhou in the live broadcast, he used the term "Shanhe Posui" to describe the terrain of Yungui Plateau, which caused controversy. Later, the popular anchor Dunde expressed dissatisfaction publicly, "I think the more annoying thing about this company is that many things are not discussed with the anchors, and the PR department is afraid of this and that after something happens, and they don't deal with it."

Afterwards, Yu Minhong and the anchors apologized one after another. On June 7th, Yu Minhong stated in an apology letter that the messed up evaluation of Dongfang Zhenxuan was just a kind of self-humiliation, and the expression of wanting to stay away from trouble did not mean that he was no longer responsible for the operation of New Oriental and Dongfang Zhenxuan.

However, the matter did not end there, and Yu Minhong spoke out for the anchors again soon after.

On July 5th, Yu Minhong posted on his Douyin account again, asking everyone not to attack Dongfang Zhenxuan and any anchor working with Yuhui, and strongly urging everyone to express their opinions in a rational and peaceful manner no matter where they speak, with more tolerance and kindness.

However, this call was questioned by many netizens. Some netizens commented that Yu has never denied rumors for Yuhui, and he even mentioned him when denying for others. Some also reflected that their comments were deleted, feeling that Yu Minhong's post was full of fatherhood.

To some extent, the relationship between Yu Minhong and netizens has turned in the opposite direction, causing him to close the comments on Douyin. Traffic is a double-edged sword. While promoting the development of Dongfang Zhenxuan, it also inevitably brings troubles, and this is a problem that Yu Minhong must solve.

As of July 10th, the main account of Dongfang Zhenxuan on Douyin has 29.896 million fans, dropping below 30 million, and the number of fans has decreased by more than 400,000 in the past month.

In fact, the problems exposed by Dongfang Zhenxuan are not life-threatening major issues, and anchor's slip of tongue belongs to the business category. The expression of dissatisfaction by the anchors reflects a company management issue. These problems can be solved through internal management, but Yu Minhong’s focus is on netizens’ comments.

Yu Minhong's role is more like a teacher. This role recognition makes him see the company's employees as students and wants to protect them.

He stated in his post that the development of Dongfang Zhenxuan and his peers is a proof of the hard work of young people such as Yuhui, Dunde, Mingming, and Yoyo, but unfortunately, in this development process, he did not protect these children well and allowed them to be exposed to public opinion frequently.

The current situation is definitely not what Yu Minhong wants to see. He has been trying to bring Dongfang Zhenxuan on track and get rid of its dependence on individual anchors. In fact, his series of actions to remove Dong from the CEO position during the "Small Composition" incident have already shown his position.

Since this year, Dongfang Zhenxuan has also accelerated its matrix layout. While multi-channel layout, Dongfang Zhenxuan is also continuously exerting efforts in self-operated business.

On June 26, East Buy launched its Douyin live broadcast for clothing. So far, in addition to working with Hui Tongxing, East Buy's layout on Douyin also includes self-operated, books, beautiful life, explore the world, clothing, and 1-hour delivery accounts. Yu Minhong's plan is to add more than 10 vertical category accounts on Douyin this year.

In terms of channels, East Buy has also carried out overall layout. In February, East Buy first launched on the video platform. So far, East Buy has covered mainstream platforms such as Tmall, JD.com, PDD Holdings, and Little Red Book.

In terms of self-operated products, according to data released in June, East Buy's self-operated products had a GMV of over 3.6 billion yuan from December 2023 to May 2024, a year-on-year increase of 108% and a month-on-month increase of 74%. Currently, East Buy has over 400 self-operated products, with 260 products on sale during the same period.

Since starting New Oriental from scratch, Yu Minhong has experienced many ups and downs in his life. At its peak, he led New Oriental to go public in the United States, making it the first education institution to be listed in the US and also trained many outstanding teachers. Such experiences have made him a respected teacher.

However, the factors that made New Oriental successful are obviously not suitable for East Buy. Teaching students and selling to the public are completely different tracks, and Yu Minhong obviously prefers the former.

This closure of comments may be a signal that Yu Minhong will lead East Buy to transform more firmly. Where will East Buy go? Only time will tell.