As an Internet company in China by market capitalization second only to Tencent and BABA, Meituan has the advantage of being good at finding major directions and fighting tough battles, which gives it ample room to expand its platform in the era of great expansion of the consumer Internet.

Today, the macro environment is beginning to change, and it is becoming more and more difficult and uncertain to do it on a large scale. Increasing investment in technology has become the most conformable trend, which means huge expenditure. This is a heavier burden for Meituan, whose business has the characteristics of low gross margin.

Under the new environment and new structure, the coming year will be a year in which Meituan ushered in great changes.

At Meituan's twice-yearly strategy meeting in September 2021, founder, Chairman and CEO Wang Xing announced that Meituan's strategy would be upgraded from "Food + Platform" to "Retail + Technology".

Meituan will move from service retail to physical retail, and take science and technology as a strategic direction. It is understood that Meituan's investment in science and technology will continue to be related to "eating", including preferred warehousing efficiency improvement, artificial meat, environmentally friendly materials, unmanned distribution, intelligent customer service system and so on.

Accordingly, Meituan also carried out organizational restructuring, with Chen Liang, senior vice president, in charge of the three business departments: shopping, Fast Donkey, and selection. A week later, Meituan's preferred business leaders began to turn to Meituan vice president and head of the fast donkey business department Guo Wanhuai to report, and Guo Wanhuai reported to Chen Liang.

"later LatePost" learned that the adjustment is not yet over, and Meituan has other personnel changes next.

Compared with other big Internet companies, Meituan's core team is more stable and power decision-making is more centralized. "later LatePost" collates Meituan's latest organizational structure-Wang Xinghe's seven business positions, which constitute Meituan's core team.

In terms of system, Meituan uses the core decision-making group + committee system to manage the company. Meituan currently has two core decision-making groups, s-team and g-team, and more than a dozen committees. The core decision-making group is responsible for the major decisions of the company's business, and the committee is responsible for personnel training and knowledge precipitation.

Organizationally, Meituan is one of the few large Internet companies that have not spun off their businesses to set up subsidiaries. Meituan is also more inclined to a flexible organizational structure, did not set up CMO, COO, CIO and other positions, each line of business independently reported to the first position of the business.

In terms of personnel, Meituan's senior executives do not change frequently. In 2020, the first position of each business of JD.com and DiDi Global Inc. was almost rotated, while the first position of Meituan's main business was not changed. There are also few fresh faces in Meituan's senior management team.

Wang Xing is one of the few large companies who is still the founder of CEO.

In 2021, Huang Zheng, Zhang Yiming and Su Hua successively resigned as CEO. Wang Xing is one of the few big Internet companies who is still the founder of CEO, and he has directly managed more affairs in the past year.

Wang Xing divides people into four types: exploration type, achievement type, destruction type and social type. He thinks he is exploratory-with a strong curiosity about the world. He is more willing to spend time reading a lot of books and meeting a large number of people than company management. He carries Kindle with him, and many people give him books as gifts.

After Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen retired at the end of last year, Wang Xing took over the four businesses he had previously been responsible for from Wang Huiwen. According to the incomplete statistics of "later LatePost", there are 10 people reporting directly to Wang Xing in Meituan at present.

Seven of them are Mu Rongjun, co-founder and senior vice president, Wang Puzhong, senior vice president and president of the home business group, Chen Liang, senior vice president, Zhang Chuan, senior vice president and president of the arrival business group, Chen Shaohui, senior vice president, group CFO and head of the strategic investment department, Guo Wanhuai, vice president, head of the optimization and fast donkey business department, and Li Shubin, vice president and general manager of Meituan platform. These eight people, including Wang Xing, are also members of Meituan's highest decision-making body, s-team.

The other three people who reported to Wang Xing were Yu Jianlin, general manager of the comment Division, Xia Huaxia, general manager of the intelligent transportation platform, and Zhang Jinmao, general manager of the basic platform. The three reported directly to Wang Huiwen, and after Wang Huiwen retired, they all reported to Wang Xing instead.

Meituan's highest decision-making body is s-team, with a total of eight people, including Wang Xing, Mu Rongjun, Wang Puzhong, Zhang Chuan, Chen Liang, Chen Shaohui, Li Shubin and Guo Wanhuai. Important decisions of the company need to be deliberated and voted on by the agency, such as strategy formulation, personnel appointment, new business development, etc.

On October 27, Meituan announced the establishment of a special group on a small scale within the company, which will be responsible for the discussion and resolution of retail-related business. The group has five members, namely, Wang Xing, Wang Puzhong, Chen Liang, Guo Wanhuai and Li Shubin. Later LatePost learned that the group was later named goods-team (Commodity Group), or g-team for short.

Meituan's core executives are very concentrated. Meituan also did not set up CTO, CMO, CPO and other posts. Technology, products, channels and other business lines are unified under the business one-bit management. Meituan's business is diversified and complex, and each line of business is more efficient in independent reporting.

Meituan set up more than a dozen committees in charge of products, technology, business analysis, and so on. Meituan committee is mainly divided by posts, and its role is to promote operation, standardization construction, personnel training and knowledge precipitation. Meituan's previous head of manpower, Liu Lin, is from Tencent, and this committee system is modelled on Tencent.

Wang Xing is the director of the risk Management Committee, the consultant of the Product Committee and the Director of the Social responsibility Committee.

A Meituan person said that Wang Xing's main focus is on the control of the company's strategy and direction, "making a few and important decisions."

Wang Xing pays special attention to the selection of Meituan. A Meituan person said that (Wang Xing) will attend Meituan's preferred management meeting every week, pay attention to business details and participate in decision-making. "Brother Xing will be so meticulous as to find a problem in the delivery link of performance." "

Wang Xing is also partly focused on investment, said a person familiar with Wang Xing. In the past, Wang Xing opened hundreds of tab pages in the browser interface to enter information in a timely manner. Now he will actually participate in the way of investment. Some of Meituan's recent science and technology projects are led by Wang Xing. Wang Xing also attended the strategy meeting of Li Auto Inc., the chosen company, and gave suggestions at the beginning of this year.

Wang Xing has no independent office, only one station, which is located on the second floor of Hengdian Building. He is often so busy that he has to trot all the way to meetings, said an employee on the same floor. He will sometimes be caught pacing up and down the corridor.

A former management of Meituan concluded that Wang Xing's underlying traits such as optimism, curiosity, imagination and vision were "born".

A team of senior executives who have grown up in the competition

In Internet companies with rapidly changing management teams, Meituan's executive team is relatively stable.

In Meituan's current senior management team, with the exception of Zhang Chuan in 2017 and Li Shubin in 2019, the others are "old Meituan". Mu Rongjun, Chen Liang and Guo Wanhuai are all start-up members of Meituan. Chen Shaohui, Wang Puzhong, Yu Jianlin, Xia Huaxia and Zhang Jinmao have all worked for Meituan for six or seven years.

In 2020, positions were rotated in the first place of DiDi Global Inc. and JD.com 's main business, but few senior executives were rotated by Meituan. Even if the first position of the business is transferred, Meituan tends to be promoted from under the same business, such as Wang Puzhong and Guo Qing, who spent many years in the takeout and wine travel business respectively, and then was promoted to head of the business after Wang Huiwen and Chen Liang were transferred.

They were screened out through Meituan's big and small campaigns. In a series of battles, they also formed a relatively neat methodology of corporate management and business governance, and highly recognized Meituan's culture and values. Most of them are technical engineers, pragmatic, data-and logic-driven, and business-oriented.

Compared with byte jump keen to acquire entrepreneurial teams, almost all of the executives introduced by Meituan in the later period have the experience of operating a large platform, both because of Meituan's high business complexity and because of the high cost of offline business mistakes.

Typical examples are Wang Puzhong, who started his own business before joining Meituan, and he was also one of the founding employees of Baidu, Inc. takeout; Zhang Chuan was an executive at 58 Group and Baidu, Inc.; and Li Shubin had no work experience in a large company. but it founded the vertical e-commerce site Hao Le Buy in 2007.

Meituan's organizational structure consists of two business groups (home and store), three platforms (Meituan platform, intelligent transportation platform, basic research and development platform) and several business departments (selection, fast donkey, shopping, review, etc.).

Wang Puzhong, president of the Home Business Group, has joined Meituan for six and a half years. He has long managed the takeout business and has been promoted rapidly by virtue of his outstanding performance in the takeout business-he joined Meituan as a senior director in April 2015, promoted to vice president in 2016, became senior vice president in January 2018, and joined s-team. Today, takeout is Meituan's pillar business, accounting for nearly 60% of total revenue in 2020.

Meituan's pharmaceutical business and drones are also the responsibility of Wang Puzhong. He only used more than ten months, Meituan's drug retail scale rose to the first echelon.

People who are familiar with him say that Wang Puzhong has a strong "business sense". When the community e-commerce business went to war in 2020, he judged that Pinduoduo was the most powerful opponent. This is a protracted war, and it is difficult for startups and companies with no relevant experience to win. This is consistent with the current industry pattern of community e-commerce.

A person close to Wang Puzhong said that he is good at communication. "Lao Wang (Wang Huiwen) has a hot temper. Puzhong is one of the few people with whom Meituan can communicate deeply with Lao Wang." "

However, Wang Huiwen expressed different opinions on this comment. "he was able to communicate with me not because of his strong communication skills, but because of his strong ability," he said.

Chen Liang joined Meituan in 2011. he has experienced many important battles of Meituan and has served as head of business such as wine brigade, food shopping, selection and so on. He led Meituan to break through from the site of Trip.com, the first place in the OTA industry, and brought Meituan's wine and travel to the second place in the industry.

Chen Liang is cautious and will break down every link of his business in great detail and pay attention to logical self-consistency. During the 2020 epidemic, the Buy Food Division tried a model similar to that of community e-commerce. At that time, Chen Liang said that the model (community e-commerce) was not very clear, asking people to focus on buying food.

When taking the preferred business, unlike the lightning play of Buy more and Orange Heart, Chen Liang pays more attention to the construction of logistics and supply chain. He believes that Meituan should first find the direction, then step on the accelerator, and repeatedly emphasize the basic retail skills internally.

During the adjustment on October 27, Chen Liang managed three business departments: shopping, Fast Donkey and selection. A week later, Meituan's preferred business leaders began to turn to Meituan vice president Guo Wanhuai to report, and Guo Wanhuai reported to Chen Liang.

Guo Wanhuai is one of the founding members of Meituan. In her early years, she was in charge of Meituan's HR and operation. She also worked as the financial bp (business partner) of Meituan takeout, reporting to CFO. Now she is the head of Meituan's fast donkey and selection business department. According to an interview with Meituan in 2018 by Chang Gung Science and Technology, an independent science and technology media, Guo Wanhuai internally proposed that if you can't make it clear in one sentence, don't do it. This became one of the bases for Meituan's decision-making in his early years.

A Meituan fast donkey said that Guo Wanhuai will personally interview some grass-roots positions in order to familiarize himself with the business, and an interview sometimes lasts as long as two hours.

Zhang Chuan joined Meituan in 2017. he was originally in charge of the arrival business. after Chen Liang was transferred to be in charge of the fresh business, he became also in charge of the wine tour. These two businesses are called Meituan's "cash cow". Recently, after Guo Qing, general manager of the cycling business department, left, he took over the cycling business department again.

Before joining Meituan, Zhang Chuan was the head of the product department of Baidu, Inc. Alliance and the executive vice president of 58 Group. A person who arrives at the store said that he has a wealth of experience in the operation and management of the platform and has previously operated a variety of high-frequency and low-frequency businesses. He summed up a set of methodology about the platform, he believes that dynamic imbalance can form a real platform; platform standardization determines the size of the platform; high frequency is difficult to hit low frequency; the efficiency of the supply side is high, and the value of the platform is great.

Zhang Chuan is very diligent in his work. He works almost seven days a week, fifteen or sixteen hours a day. "said the above-mentioned person who arrived at the store.

In Meituan's senior management team, Li Shubin joined the latest. He joined in charge of Meituan platform in 2019. In less than two years, Li Shubin joined the s-team, Meituan's highest decision-making body.

When he was in college, Li Shubin taught himself programming and founded the Communication University Of China campus forum "Walnut Forest" for students to exchange and share. It changed the course of his life. Li Shubin said in an interview with the media in 2012 that until he entered college, he thought that the path of life should be to get a doctorate, go to a large company, and then return home. After graduation, he took a completely opposite path-starting a business. The most successful one was the launch of the footwear e-commerce website Hole Buy in 2007.

It is Chen Shaohui who is in charge of Meituan's financial power. In 2014, Chen Shaohui joined Meituan as vice president of strategic investment. Chen Shaohui has previous work experience in a number of well-known financial institutions-he has worked in Morgan Stanley, WI-Harper, China Economic Cooperation and Tencent Investment Department. He is also one of the few senior executives of Meituan who has studied at MBA (Harvard Business School).

He played a key role in the merger of Meituan and Dianping. In 2017, Meituan set up a 2 billion-yuan Meituan Industrial Fund (later renamed Dragon Ball Fund), and Chen Shaohui served as CEO, an industrial fund management company. Today, Chen Shaohui is Meituan's group CFO, responsible for finance, strategic planning, investment and capital market related matters.

In Meituan, the person who acts as the "butler" is the co-founder Mu Rongjun. He is an alumnus of Wang Xing's Tsinghua University. He started a business with Wang Xing during Fanfou, and is now in charge of Meituan's manpower, legal affairs, government relations and other functional departments. Some people close to Mu Rongjun say that he pays attention to principles, is the spokesman of Meituan's spirit, and has a high internal reputation and trust, so he acts as an glue in Meituan's management team. He also pays great attention to detail. I will be meticulous to punctuation when reading subordinates' weekly reports.

It took Meituan 11 years to grow from a start-up to a mature company. The size of the company, the complexity of the business and the number of employees have also greatly increased. The most important battlefield of the company is not only the battle of new business, but also the war of talent, organization and management.

At such a moment, Mu Rongjun took over the important task of personnel training and the construction of the company's culture system. The focus of his reform in 2020 is to adjust the rank system to improve organizational efficiency and expand the scale of school enrollment to increase the density of talents.

Super brain and middle power

As Meituan grows up from a start-up company with dozens of people to a large company with tens of thousands of people, it is becoming more and more difficult for CEO to convey its thinking and promote its corporate culture.

In the early days, Wang Xing shared some of this week's thoughts with employees in the office every weekend. As the company gets bigger, there are fewer such scenes.

A former Meituan takeout employee said that when the daily average volume of takeout business exceeds 2000 million and 3000 million respectively, Meituan will hold a simple celebration on the first floor of the Hengdian Building. Wang Xing will stand behind the two-meter-long celebration cake and give a speech with a microphone in hand. After the speech, the cake was distributed to onlookers and passing employees. "this is one of the few occasions where we can see Brother Xing." "

'people are the most important asset of the company, 'Mr. Wang said in an interview with Caijing magazine in 2017. But people's growth can not be rapid.

Take an inventory of Meituan's existing talent echelon, this company has a pretty good executive team, they constitute Meituan's super brain. But the strength in the middle is weak.

Taking the arrival business group as an example, Zhang Jing, the person in charge of the comprehensive business department of the original arrival store, Liu Pengcheng, the head of the technical platform department, and Hua Fang, the head of the platform product department, were transferred to the optimization, and Guo Qing, the person in charge of the original wine brigade, was transferred to the cycling business department (currently resigned). Now, as the president of the hotel business group, Zhang Chuan needs to directly manage to the two business sectors of the store integration and wine travel.

After Wang Huiwen left, the taxi-hailing business lacked a person who could manage the overall situation, so Wang Xing had to invest more energy on his own. Two FM (function manger) in the taxi-hailing business now report to Wang Xing every two weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.

As a result, Meituan is now faced with two problems: first, it is difficult for someone to make up after the loss of senior executives; second, the radius that executives have to manage is too large, and many things need to be done in person.

On the one hand, Meituan has successively introduced middle-and high-level talents from the outside, such as Liu Xiaogang, who joined the regiment this year. It turned out that NetEase, Inc strictly selected CEO;, former Yunji Inc, and CMO Hu Jianjian, who joined Meituan last year to be responsible for the preferred commodity business.

On the other hand, Meituan began to pay attention to the cultivation of the internal middle level. In December 2020, Meituan set up the Middle and Senior Executive Development Department, which is responsible for Mu Rongjun, facing the middle and senior managers of Meituan, in charge of cadre training and development, selection and transfer, evaluation, motivation, and so on.

Under the platform strategy, Meituan did not split the business.

Meituan adopts the organizational structure of business group + division. At present, there are two business groups, four business departments and three platforms.

Meituan is one of the large companies that have developed diversified businesses, and a few of them have not spun off their businesses. DiDi Global Inc. spun off autopilot, Orange Heart Optimization, and Green Orange Bicycle, and raised money independently, and the online ride-hailing business also existed in the form of subsidiaries; BABA, after having the main body of e-commerce, also formulated a three-stage rocket strategy, namely Ant Financial Services Group, Aliyun and Cainiao Logistics. At that time, he also planned to spin off the three businesses and list them independently; JD.com 's logistics and health businesses are all independently listed companies.

For a multi-business company, splitting the business to set up a subsidiary can allow the subsidiary to raise funds and list independently while the company is doing a large scale, so as to avoid affecting the financial situation of the parent company. This may be the way to kill two birds with one stone.

A JD.com investor told LatePost later that there must be peripheral forces in the war, and some businesses can serve not only themselves, but also the entire industry.

Meituan put many businesses together, adhere to the split, is based on its platform strategy-so that users can enjoy a variety of services on one platform. "later LatePost" previously reported that Meituan had planned to break up the fresh elephant and contacted a small number of investors, but was stopped at the last minute by Wang Xing. The main reason is that Wang Xing believes that Meituan's mission is to help people eat better and live a better life, and in addition to going to the restaurant and takeout, buying food is also an important scene for eating, so it should not be split up, and even if there are many difficulties, it should be done inside the company.

Meituan has only one subsidiary in history-Cat's Eye Film. Meituan hatched Cat's Eye Film in 2012, became an independent subsidiary in July 2015, and introduced investment from Light Media and Tencent in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Meituan split the cat's eye to a large extent because it was difficult to go deep into the creative industry, so it would be better to hand over the dominance.

However, this feature may also change as Meituan upgrades his strategy to "retail + technology".

In the post-scale era, small giants pursue high-quality growth

Meituan should pursue high-quality growth instead of relying solely on subsidies and flows, but will still invest in what should be invested, Wang said at a strategy meeting in September 2021.

Specifically, Meituan has done two things: one is to control the scale and spend money more efficiently; the other is to upgrade the strategy.

A less obvious change is that Meituan's personnel plans to move from big expansion to normal growth. Meituan will allocate personnel and resources in the coming year to improve efficiency, a person familiar with the matter said.

Some businesses are controlling the scale. After DiDi Global Inc. was removed from the shelves, Meituan shareholders suggested at a board meeting in July whether to take advantage of the opportunity to use high subsidies for taxi-hailing business, according to two people familiar with the matter. later, s-team considered the policy environment and its organizational ability and thought that it should not invest heavily at this time.

According to "later LatePost", Meituan, with 16000 people, is also controlling the size of the team, no longer recruiting a large number of people, no longer focusing on new users, and focusing on expanding products and improving business efficiency; Fast Donkey will close most cities in the near future, leaving only first-and second-tier cities; takeout is further improving human efficiency. For example, in the past, local promoters were only responsible for 25 stores, but now one person has to cover 80,130.

More important is the upgrade strategy. Wang Xing mentioned at the strategy meeting that Meituan's future strategic direction is "retail + technology." He believes that up to now, Meituan can only be regarded as a third-rate technology company, and a first-class technology company has its own operating system capabilities, such as Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc-CL C, Amazon.Com Inc, and so on. Second-class technology companies have applied innovations with global influence on the basis of the former technology, such as Facebook Inc.

Wang Xing said at the strategy meeting that Meituan's strategy is to first change from third-rate to second-rate, and then find an opportunity to become first-rate in the future.

Accordingly, Meituan needs to upgrade his organization. Meituan's past organizational structure and personnel training were designed according to the requirements of the war, emphasizing implementation and competition-driven. The existing organizational strength is unable to meet the challenges of the future.

Meituan needs to gradually develop capabilities that he did not have in the past, such as supply chain and logistics capabilities, and the ability to develop more advanced technologies. He also needs to further improve organizational efficiency and invest money in the underlying technology that he wanted to invest in the past, but has no spare capacity to invest in.

Recently, Meituan began to emphasize Amazon.Com Inc's "reverse work method" internally. "every department is promoting it," said a Meituan person. It refers to the way of thinking from the end to the beginning to make major decisions, enterprises must first find out what the customer wants, and then reverse the operation. Wang Xing said at the strategy meeting that Meituan's learning from Amazon.Com Inc is far from enough-- not even rigid learning.

Meituan last emphasized that whole-class learning was in 2018. After the listing of the company, Wang Xingfa's internal letter asked Meituan employees to "practice their basic skills"-various departments will hold discussion activities to practice basic skills and let employees define their own basic skills and write essays of hundreds of words. Since then, Meituan employees can see the slogan of "practice basic skills" in the lobby wallpaper, employee desktop wallpaper, lanyard and other places.

When the business is booming, a lot of problems are covered up, and when growth slows, the big test for CEO and the management team really comes-- how to lead the company through the cycle and continue to move forward.