🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

The price war has cost Meituan its profits

• Investor relief tracks the hit to earnings. Meituan posted a net loss of 18.6 billion yuan in Q3 2025, compared with a 12.9 billion yuan profit a year earlier 1.
• Losses came from the core local-commerce unit. It flipped to an operating loss of 14.1 billion yuan as food delivery competition intensified 1.
• Spending surged across the sector. In Q2 2025, Meituan, Alibaba, and JD.com logged combined sales and marketing expenses of 102.7 billion yuan 2.
• Morningstar analysts expect Meituan’s share of the on-demand delivery market by gross transaction value (the total value of orders processed on a platform) to drop from 73% to 55% by 2027, while Alibaba rises from 21% to 40% 1.

Beijing is moving to end the growth-at-all-costs tech playbook

• Beijing is pushing back on “involution,” meaning cutthroat competition that yields diminishing returns, and the price-war messaging fits that effort 3.
• Regulators are also targeting similar price-war patterns in China’s new energy vehicle industry 3.
• Draft guidelines lay out next steps. They say platforms should not directly or implicitly require merchants to share promotion costs, and they call for fatigue alerts for delivery riders who take orders continuously for more than four hours 4.
• Policy focus is moving away from heavy subsidies. It leans toward fairer and more orderly competition, including service quality and innovation 4.