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.

As a platform for Byte's management capacity output, Feishu has its own Internet genes. However, with the increasingly fierce competition in the field of collaborative office, Feishu has begun to shift its focus to business scenarios in the manufacturing industry.

On July 17th, Feishu project officially released the "Feishu project IPD product solution" for manufacturing enterprises. IPD stands for integrated product development, representing a product development methodology that emphasizes cross-departmental collaboration to ensure coordination throughout the product development process.

According to Hong Tao, Feishu's Vice President of Product, this solution can deal with uncertain results by establishing a systematic R&D management system, which relies on rules. At the same time, facing complex projects, the solution can break down isolated systems, establish end-to-end processes, and help users monitor progress globally.

The Feishu project originated from ByteDance's research and development practice, and was designed for the complex project management needs of modern enterprises. This IPD product solution is equivalent to the Feishu project PRO version, a customized solution launched on the platform for the manufacturing industry.

Since its commercial launch in 2021, the Feishu project has experienced rapid development. With product highlights such as a "visualized, standardized, and highly configurable" workflow engine, the Feishu project has attracted more than 1,000 leading enterprises in different industries, including Xiaomi, Anker Innovations, and Nio Inc.

The IPD product solution of Feishu project has gone through two years of continuous research and development and a lot of investment before it was officially launched. Up to now, the IPD product solution of Feishu project has been implemented in companies such as Ruijie Networks, Newland, Mary Kay, and SKG.

As the Feishu project further develops vertically, the Feishu layout also deepens into the industrial end. Feishu CEO Xie Xin said at the meeting that from the initial collaborative office software to the integration of people and things in Feishu People, Feishu hopes to further enhance the company's value through the Feishu project.

An insider close to Feishu told Wall Street News that Feishu's move is mainly to win more customers. The number of software companies is limited. Many companies with collaboration requirements and paying capabilities are hardware companies, which naturally want to learn IPD or have already adopted IPD, but they are struggling with the lack of good SaaS tools that can be used right out of the box. The Feishu project product fills the market gap.

The above-mentioned person further stated that IPD is more suitable for focusing on resources and making big things happen. The manufacturing industry has a large market share and has a large room for improving efficiency. Whether it is the process of technology or R&D review, especially the latter, it can improve R&D efficiency by avoiding risks in advance.

At present, the biggest attraction of the IPD product solution of the Feishu project lies in its ability to handle complex business scenarios.

The Feishu project IPD product solution has three major functional highlights: plan management, review management, and process optimization. Taking plan management as an example, in the project start-up stage, the Feishu project's unique process nesting and plan table functions can achieve multi-level breakdown of the project, and assign each task to the corresponding person in the finest granularity.

For the process optimization function, in response to the problem that traditional project management tools in the past have become rigid and difficult to quickly iterate on processes, the Feishu project added metrics, resource libraries and other methods in the IPD solution, making continuous insight into problems and flexible process optimization possible.

Taking the electric vehicle industry as an example, this is a technology-intensive product that is produced in large quantities, and the industry chain is very complex. There is a high standard for its own system and tool capabilities. Feishu has improved the R&D efficiency of the electric vehicle industry through tools and projects.

Nio Inc began using the Feishu project two years ago. Jiang Yong, Senior Director of Digital Development Department of the company, said that 30% of R&D efficiency has been achieved. "Before, there were multiple tools used offline and online, but now we tend to use Feishu project to link all tools and combine offline management, achieving an 80% coverage of the R&D chain. The transparency of R&D resources has been significantly improved."

However, the challenges are also evident. From its own perspective, the Feishu project is better at R&D management of Internet companies, and Byte's genes lie in product rather than hardware. From the Internet to the manufacturing industry, this is not just a simple crossing of boundaries, and Feishu needs to gain a deep understanding of the industry scene. After all, only by understanding manufacturing industry can we better understand project management in manufacturing industry.

From the industry's perspective, the IPD product solution of the Feishu project still faces market competition. In May of this year, DingTalk and Ruijie jointly released the "Full-stack new generation IPD intelligent solution" to accelerate the intelligent landing of the IPD system.

Feishu was born in 2016, a year of rapid development for Byte. In the past few years, it has grown from an internal collaborative office software to an independent office platform. In 2023, Feishu's software subscription revenue exceeded $0.2 billion, achieving double-digit growth, but there is still a long way to go to profitability.

At the beginning of the year, Feishu carried out business contraction, releasing a signal of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. According to insiders at Feishu, the company will continue to invest for a long time. Focusing on the digitalization opportunities in the manufacturing industry shows that Feishu's investment style has become more pragmatic and the next step will be a difficult market attack.