Meituan

HKEX:3690

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q1

[Operator]

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Meituan First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker for today, Ms. Scarlett Xu. Thank you. Please go ahead.

[Scarlett Xu, executive]

Thank you, operator. Good evening and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining us today are Mr. Xing Wang, Chairman and CEO; and Mr. Shaohui Chen, Senior Vice President and CFO of Meituan. For today's call, management will first provide a review of our first quarter 2021 results and then conduct a Q&A session.

Before we start, we would like to remind you that our presentation contains forward-looking statements, which include a number of risks and uncertainties and may differ from actual results in the future. This presentation is based on our management accounts, which have not been audited or reviewed by our auditor.

This presentation also contains unaudited non-IFRS financial measures that should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, measures of the company's financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. For a detailed discussion of risk factors and non-IFRS measures, please refer to the disclosure documents in the IR section of our website.

Now I will turn the call over to Mr. Xing Wang. Please go ahead, Xing.

[Xing Wang, executive]

Thank you, Scarlett, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Meituan's First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call.

For the first quarter of 2021, our total revenue increased by 120.9% year-over-year to RMB 37 billion. Adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net loss were negative RMB 2.4 billion and RMB 3.9 billion, respectively, in 2021 Q1.

Annual transacting users on our platform increased to 569.3 million, while the number of annual active merchants increased to 7.1 million. The average number of transactions per transacting user increased to 30.5x for the 12 months of 2021 from 26.2x in 2020 Q1.

This year, Chinese New Year was special. To prevent the COVID outbreak, citizens were encourage to travel less and stay in their working cities during the holiday period. In response to this special arrangement, we launched the Chinese New Year Open for Business at [Foreign Language], the initiative, and arranged for merchants to work throughout the holiday period to supply a diverse range of quality foods and services for our consumers. During this period, we also provide delivery riders with better care, amenities and incentives. We are proud that our governments have effectively contained the COVID in China, which led to a strong recovery in demand for local services consumption in Q1.

Meanwhile, growth across the different business segments on our platform had been strong with total annual transacting users close to 570 million for an increase of 26.9% year-over-year and annual active merchants reaching 7.1 million or an increase of 16.9% year-over-year at the end of Q1. We are pleased to see that our platform has continued to generate more quality services and value for consumers and merchants while also reinforcing our strong brand influence as the leading local service platform in China.

In Q1, our total food delivery orders grew by more than 110% year-over-year with a 2-year CAGR of 32% as measured from Q1 of 2019. The strong order growth was mainly driven by 2 factors. First would be ongoing change in users' consumption habits and lifestyles. But the second was the increasing diversity of supplies on our platform as we improved the merchant operation and services.

On the consumer side, we were pleased to see that food delivery is not only a necessity and a service needed regularly doing workdays but also a high-quality source of food for family gathering events during important festivals such as the Chinese New Year. As some people prefer to stay at home rather than dine out during the holidays, we launched the Open for Business initiative wherein we cooperated with millions of merchants to provide the consumers with the deliveries of holiday Chinese New Year products for dining, liquor, snacks and groceries during the holidays. We are glad to see that our consumer cherish the convenience and quality of our services.

Naturally, these initiatives brought a commendable growth to our food delivery orders with the number of orders recorded during the 7-day holiday period increasing by 116% versus same period in 2019 with a 2-year CAGR of 47%. Our food delivery DAU and transacting users also grew substantially on a year-over-year basis.

With many merchants open for business during Chinese New Year, we dedicated more resources to a wider range of marketing and promotional events, incentivizing consumers to bring more new users onto our platform and increasing our user conversion rates. Notably, the user addition and transaction frequency of high-quality users increased meaningfully during the Chinese New Year holiday.

During Q1, we also expanded our food delivery consumption scenarios and delivery [indiscernible] to better meet the increasingly diverse and constantly evolving demands of consumers, with order contribution from the breakfast, afternoon tea and late-night snacks categories further increasing and long-distance orders becoming a more meaningful part of our total order composition.

As a result of our increasing differentiated specialized merchant operations strategies, both annual active merchants and advertising merchants for food delivery grew to record highs in Q1. Meanwhile, sales from high-quality merchants also increased, comprising a larger proportion of our total orders.

To help merchants optimize their digital operations, we continued to train more digital-savvy talents. As the trend of restaurant merchant digitization is at a rise, the restaurant industry has evolved into one where dining out and order-in services are equally important to restaurant merchants and relatively constructive for each other's growth.

Through the merchants' data analysis and modeling, we have drawn some preliminary conclusions. For example, when food delivery orders comprise roughly 30% of the total order volumes of lunch and dinner restaurants and roughly 50% of light-meal restaurants, these restaurants can best optimize their average revenue per restaurant worker and average revenue per square foot of restaurant space, thus achieving a fine balance between their online and offline operations.

Going forward, to help merchants better manage their digital operations, we will continue to invest in our New Restaurant Manager program, improve our ability to serve and grow the merchants and put better talent training system in place.

For our on-demand delivery network, we believe providing ample delivery capacity and consistent service quality are both key to ensuring optimal user experiences. Therefore, during this year's special Chinese New Year period, we preemptively strategized around our operations to better satisfy consumer demand.

In particular, we focused on providing sufficient delivery services and properly managing delivery riders working during the period. Our delivery rider benefit project, the Tongzhou Project, means in the same boat. So we rolled out the project and we rolled out new incentives and benefits designed specifically for the Chinese New Year. Our benefits and incentives for delivery riders surpassed RMB 500 million during the 7-day holiday.

We also continued to hold more panel sessions with the delivery riders on their long-term career paths and personal growth, holding more than 98 sessions as of now. In these sessions, delivery riders could freely offer us their feedback, complaints and suggestions, which we will then appropriately incorporate into our business planning and improvements. We also offered free online medical consultation services to delivery riders in 100 cities during Chinese New Year to provide riders with instant and helpful advice.

In addition, we upgraded the hardware used by the delivery riders, including smart helmets and delivery pick-up lockers at the restaurants in some pilot areas.

Now moving on to our second segment. On the back of effective country management for COVID-19, our in-store, hotel & travel segment had fully recovered in the fourth -- first quarter. During Chinese New Year, as people were encouraged to stay put in their working cities, we captured the explosive demand for in-store services. We strategized for -- provide an abundant selection of merchants and supply of services and our Open for Business initiative.

Meanwhile, during Q1, we pilot our theme-based marketing and promotional events to deploy in festivals and service categories, further elevating our in-store transaction numbers, GTVs and number of merchants. This goes to show that we maintain a distinctive and strong consumption -- or consumer mind share as the leading platform to help consumers explore local-level sales as well as quality merchants and value-for-money services.

For in-store dining, our 2-year GTV CAGR was nearly 30% in Q1 from the same period of 2019. During Chinese New Year, our GTV and transaction volumes growth both accelerated to reach historical highs. As gathering dining fully recovered, light meal options also maintained a high growth rate.

On the supply side, we continued to penetrate more high-quality chain restaurants, upgrading our service quality. In March, we announced the 2021 version of our Black Pearl list, which covered 22 cities in China and 3 cities overseas. By now, our Black Pearl list are well established among both consumers and merchants as a compass for reputable culinary and other recommendations. So essentially the mission guide for China.

And for other in-store services, our 2-year revenue CAGR was over 30% in Q1 from the same period of 2019. New categories, such as medical aesthetics, achieved consistently strong growth, while our entire leisure and entertainment category, which was severely impacted during the pandemic, also resumed its pre-COVID growth momentum with a 2-year CAGR of nearly 30%. Besides the promotion during the Chinese New Year, we also helped to lift merchants' advertising budgets by launching various marketing and promotional festivals, such as the Wedding Festival and Back to School Festivals. And then, our competitive advantage in serving high-quality merchants and fast-expanding coverage of small to medium merchants continued to ramp up in Q1.

For our hotel business, the government's recommendations for people to stay put during Chinese New Year led to less traveling during the holiday season as compared to the Chinese New Year holiday in 2019. Nevertheless, as we look past COVID, consumer demand for hotels continued to rise in Q1, and we achieved over 100 million domestic room nights in the quarter, representing a 2-year CAGR of 13.3% as measured from Q1 of 2019.

As we continue to see improvements across hotel selections, product experiences and customer services, our focus on expanding the high-end market remains, especially for 5-star hotels. For example, in Q1, domestic room nights for 5-star hotels grew by more than 133% year-over-year, while the contribution of room nights from high-end hotel further improved to 15.7%, growing by nearly 4 percentage points from Q1 2019.

For our new initiatives segment, we continued to invest in our retail business. We view retail from a long-term perspective and giving out our capabilities across distribution, supply chain, product selections, SKU management and so on. Similarly, through multiple business models, we hope that our consumer from all parts of the country with different spending powers that enjoy our services are having their diverse demands met on our platform.

Our community e-commerce business, Meituan Select, further expanded its geographical coverage to more than 2,600 cities and counties in Q1, particularly in rural areas, practically completing our nationwide expansion objective.

Despite the seasonally quiet period for retail in February due to the Chinese New Year holiday, our overall business performance and growth was strong. We also explored new ways of acquiring users on our platform to achieve commendable growth in new user additions both in terms of our Meituan Select business and larger Meituan platform. We were pleased to see that Meituan Select's aggregated transacting users exceeded 100 million in Q1.

Importantly, we are focused on strengthening various capabilities for the long term. In Q1, we designed a more differentiated operating strategy for group leaders while improving our incentive system to increase group leader efficiency and normalize group leader commission rates. In addition, we continued the nationwide expansion of our warehousing and logistics network for our community e-commerce business.

As we explored and upgraded our next-day delivery logistical store network, we provide the Meituan Select user with a greater access to a wider range of quality goods, especially in less developed areas.

Last, we continued to improve our product selections and quality management, and we are now working with more suppliers to further diversify our range of value-for-money products. As a result, during Q1, both user retention and transaction frequency steadily increased. Going forward, we plan to further improve our operating efficiency as we continue to explore improving our capability across other important aspects. For Meituan Instashopping, to capture the rising demand and further drive growth, we channeled more resources into certain categories such as the supermarkets, flowers and prepared foods. We also stepped up our marketing efforts on the back of the demand that arose from the special Chinese New Year as people stayed put in their cities.

Additionally, the Chinese New Year shopping spree takes place days ahead of Chinese New Year's Eve. However, for the younger generations, this is no longer practical as they are often busy working in the days leading up to the festival. With the Meituan Instashopping, these individuals can conveniently order their desired goods and gifts and have them delivered on the same day. Consumers widely appreciated this service.

Also, during the week leading up to Valentine's day, flowers and gifts sales exploded. Roses, watches and iPhones for all popular gifts sold on our platform with their sales multiplying by double digits week-over-week in the period. At the same time, our number of high-ticket-size items also grew exponentially.

We are delighted to see that as we continue to obtain consumer mind share as the platform that delivers everything to consumers' doorsteps, more food delivery users used our Meituan Instashopping service for the first time ever. As a result, in Q1, quarterly transacting user reached over 70 million, significantly increasing both sequentially and year-over-year. And now on-demand delivery consumption scenarios have extended beyond pure prepared food deliveries to larger selection of groceries and other goods, resulting in higher transacting frequency and stickiness to our platform.

For Meituan Grocery, we continued to expand and optimize our operations in the 4 Tier 1 cities. That's Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. With more people staying at home and shopping in their cities during the first quarter this [ year ], we actively adjusted our supply strategy to meet this growing demand. Moreover, by focusing on providing a consistent user experience and executing multiple promotional events, we acquired more new users and increased our user transaction frequency. As such, quarterly transacting users grew by more than 400% year-over-year with the GTV also up nearly 250% year-over-year. Finally, as we quickly expanded the scale of our business with higher operating and warehousing efficiencies, we also improved our unit economics in turn.

As the leading local service provider in China, our food delivery and in-store services achieved a strong growth in Q1, thanks to government's effective containment of COVID. This growth also reflects the strong mind share that we have cultivated in both the consumers and merchants as the platform for on-demand delivery services and the go-to destination for local service explorations.

We are also actively expanding our retail businesses, such as Meituan Select and Meituan Instashopping, further optimizing our on-demand delivery network by also building new next-day delivery logistics network across the country in lower-tier markets. Through these new initiatives, we hope to bring an ever-increasing and diverse number of categories to consumers to include -- to a broader range of general merchandise.

Equally, we will also work towards better serving our small and medium merchants by providing a more holistic range of merchant services such as advertising products, B2B food distribution services and restaurant management services to accelerate this merchant business digitalization process. We are committed to helping merchants improve their operations through the better use of technology and providing consumers with more and better goods and services.

We are always open to and ready for changes. We are fully committed to our social responsibilities, which remains as our top priority. We will support the national development strategy of domestic circulation to help further stimulate the domestic consumptions and boost the rural revitalization, servicing a larger group of consumers and merchants across different markets with diverse needs.

This year, we have more feedback from the regulators, consumers, merchants and delivery riders. Their voices serve us a warning for us, helping us adjust our existing practices and optimize our operations to the best of our ability. They also serve as a motivation, inspiring us to do the right thing for their long-term development and to always create value to -- for consumers, merchants, our shareholders and society at large as we continue to fulfill our mission, that is we help people eat better, get better.

With that, I will turn the call over to Shaohui for an update on our latest financial results.

[Shaohui Chen, executive]

Thank you, Xing. Hello, everyone. I will now go through our first quarter financial results.

In the first quarter, our total revenue reached RMB 37 billion, increasing by 120% year-over-year. On a year-over-year basis, all business segments achieved growth as we recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our ongoing investment in new initiatives, particularly in our retail business, drove the increase in cost of revenues. As a percentage of total revenue, the cost of revenue increased to 80% this quarter from 69% in the prior year and 75% in the prior quarter.

Selling and marketing expenses as a percentage of total revenue were 19.5% this quarter, increasing from 19.1% in the prior year and decreasing from 20.2% from the prior quarter. Year-over-year increase was mainly due to the increase in expenditure for user subsidy, employee benefits as well as promotion and advertising, while the sequential decline was primarily attributable to a decrease in user subsidy for our food delivery business during the holiday season.

R&D expenses as a percentage of total revenue were 9.4% this quarter, decreasing from 13.7% in the prior year as a result of our improved operating leverage and increasing from 8.6% from the prior quarter due to our new business expansions and higher average salary for R&D employees.

G&A expenses as a percentage of total revenue were 4.7% in this quarter, representing percentage points decreases of 1.7 year-over-year and 0.4 percentage points quarter-over-quarter primarily due to our improved operating efficiency.

Our Q1 is usually a slow season for our food delivery and in-store, hotel & travel segments. These 2 segments continue to demonstrate healthy growth as they benefit from a strong recovery from COVID-19 and we further enhance the business operations.

During this quarter, the 2 segments combined to achieve an aggregate operating profit of RMB 3.9 billion, increasing from RMB 609 million in the prior year and RMB 3.7 billion in the prior quarter, respectively. Nevertheless, we recorded total operating loss of RMB 4.8 billion this quarter, primarily due to the rapid expansion of new business, especially the retail businesses.

On a consolidated basis, our adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net profit both experienced negative growth to negative RMB 2.4 billion and negative RMB 3.9 billion, respectively.

Now moving on to our segment reporting, starting with food delivery. During the Spring Festival, we have witnessed stronger consumers' demand for food delivery compared to the same period in previous years as people increasingly preferred to have food delivery for family gatherings, especially as people were encouraged to stay put during this holiday season. In time, our effective promotional campaigns, especially the Open for Business initiative with millions of merchants, also helped to drive order volume growth during the Spring Festival. In addition, we continued to allocate sufficient resources to our effective membership program, optimized operations among different consumption scenario and diversified the platform selections. As a result, both quarterly transacting users and their purchase frequency achieved healthy growth year-over-year, especially in the high-quality consumer base who are less price sensitive and are more willing to pay for high-value orders and long-distance deliveries.

We were able to achieve 32.1% 2-year order volume CAGR and a 37.4% 2-year GTV CAGR in this quarter. On a sequential basis, the monetization rate grew by 0.6 percentage points mainly due to our lower users subsidy ratio throughout the holiday season. Similarly, our monetization rate improved by 1.1 percentage points from the same period last year as a result of the overall recovery of the delivery business. Notably, during the Q1 last year, we launched a series of merchant support initiatives in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, such as commission rebates, commission discounts and more, which significantly lower our monetization rate.

Total food delivery revenue increased by 116.8% year-over-year to RMB 20.6 billion, representing a 2-year CAGR of 38.6% this quarter.

In terms of cost, delivery cost per order increased on a sequential basis and maintained at a similar level as compared to the same period of last year. During the first quarter of 2020, we provided more incentives for delivery riders who worked at the height of the outbreak and incurred additional costs of providing COVID-19 preventative measures for delivery riders. During the first quarter of this year, small orders were fulfilled during the period as a result of the strict guidance by the government. We increased incentives and improved the welfare for delivery riders to ensure sufficient capacity during the holiday season.

Year-over-year increase in operating margin was mainly attributable to the overall recovery of food delivery business, partially offset by the lower average value per order. On a sequential basis, higher AOV and lower subsidy ratio helped to offset the increased delivery cost per order, which allowed our operating profit and operating margin to both grow on a sequential basis to RMB 1.1 billion and 5.4%, respectively.

Now turning to our second segment. A sequential decline in revenue from our in-store, hotel & travel business was mainly due to seasonality. In addition, more people were encouraged to stay put during the holiday period, which result in decreased consumption from our hotel business around the Chinese New Year. However, on a year-over-year basis, we were pleased to see that the segment's revenue comes back, achieving triple-digit growth in the quarter. For our in-store business, we leveraged our expanded merchant base, diversified transaction-based products, optimize operational capabilities and active theme-based promotional campaigns to capture the explosive demand from consumers for local services in the quarter.

Meanwhile, we continued to be the preferred channel for local service merchants to reach their customers during the recovery period, especially the medium, small and micro-sized merchants. The merchant adoption rate of both our CPC advertising products and the subscription-based services continued to grow year-over-year. More notably, our CPC advertising revenue achieved a 2-year CAGR of more than 40%, while our subscription-based services revenue achieved a 2-year CAGR of more than 30%.

With respect to our hotel business, consumer demand for hotels continued to grow on a year-over-year basis as a result of China's effective control measures, with our domestic room nights achieving a stellar 135.8% year-over-year growth this quarter. With regard to low-star hotels and low-tier cities, we further solidified our existing advantage, enhanced the brand awareness and improved offline traffic conversion. Meantime, we also made solid progress in the high-star market this quarter, penetrating further into the high-star, especially 5-star hotels.

Operating profit for our in-store, hotel & travel business was down slightly on a quarter-over-quarter basis to RMB 2.7 billion due to seasonality, while operating margin increasing by 2.2 percentage points to 41.7%, which was mainly attributable to the reduction in user incentives in our hotel business due to seasonality. As a result of strong recovery from COVID-19, both operating profit and operating margin improved meaningfully on a year-over-year basis.

Let's now turn to our third segment, new initiatives and others. During the period, revenue in this segment increased by 136.5% year-on-year to RMB 9.9 billion driven by the recovery from COVID-19 as well as our business expansion to satisfy consumers' growing needs. Our increased revenue in this segment was mainly from our retail business, B2B food distribution services and the ridesharing business.

Operating loss from our new initiatives and others segment was negative RMB 8 billion in this quarter, increasing significantly on both a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis. Our retail business, especially our community e-commerce business, continued to be our largest investment area this quarter.

It's worth noting the Meituan -- the business is still at an early stage, and therefore, operating loss further widened during this quarter as we ramped up our community e-commerce business nationwide. Additionally, while we continue to make substantial upfront investments in warehousing and the fulfillment infrastructure during this quarter, we also continued to cultivate consumer habit and expand our group leader base through incentives. The combination of these investments and the naturally higher cost level incurred during the holiday season led to a noticeable increase in our community e-commerce business losses during this quarter. However, we are pleased to see that we achieved meaningful improvement in operating efficiency, which led to gradual improvement in our overall unit economics of our community e-commerce business during this quarter.

Looking ahead, we remain committed to investing more in our community e-commerce business to accelerate its growth while also further improving our own operating efficiency.

Now turning to our cash position. As of March 31, 2021, our cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled RMB 53.1 billion. Additionally, our operating cash flow decreased to negative RMB 4.4 billion this quarter, which was primarily attributable to our loss before income tax.

In summary, during the quarter, our business continued to perform well as we further optimized and enhanced our segment operations and benefit from the effective control of COVID-19. Our 2 primary business segments continued to deliver solid quarterly results. Moreover, their quick recovery from the impact of the pandemic has displayed not only our business resilience but also our effort in making online consumption more convenient, augmenting merchant business growth and digitizing the entire local service value chain. While we experienced an operating loss expansion in this quarter, it was in line with our long-term commitment to a sustainable development of our new initiatives.

Today, we have already witnessed positive growth across our new initiatives, especially in our retail business. As we continue to allocate resources to these new and innovative areas, particularly for community e-commerce, we will also expand our TAM, accelerate growth and, most importantly, create more value for all industry participants.

Looking ahead, we remain committed to better serving consumers and merchants through the fast action of our service and the digitization of the entire industry ecosystem. We will always follow our philosophy of prioritizing long-term rewards over short-term profitability.

With that, we are now open for Q&A.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] First question is from the line of Ronald Keung of Goldman Sachs.

[Ronald Keung, analyst]

On food delivery regulations, so I want to ask about the SAMR's recent investigation into our company for the potential anti-monopolistic practices of exclusive contracts with merchants. Can I just ask how do we see the potential impact on Meituan's business? How will this impact our competitive advantage on the merchant side? What have we adjusted so far during the self-assessment process? And in addition, just what would be the potential impact also on the recent social security regulation for flexible employment on future rider costs?

[Xing Wang, executive]

Okay. Thank you, Ronald. Well, thank you for bringing up this very important question. We believe that the government supervision on anti-monopoly practices will benefit the healthy development of the whole Internet industries. It will promote the fair competition and prevent misconducts.

In response to the investigations, we have set up a dedicated team to fully cooperate with the regulators' investigation, and we will review our existing business strategies and internal managements and also improve our compliance standards. This is a firm-wide strategic priority for our company.

We have conducted a comprehensive self-assessment of the issues brought up in the past from merchant feedbacks, regulatory notices, media reports and more. We will fully respect merchants' independent choices. We have prohibited any use of exclusive partnership and will be firmly against it. We have set up more transparent and effective reporting channels for merchant complaints and supervisions. We will continue to proactively cooperate with the regulators going forward and fully respect restaurants independent choices.

In terms of our day-to-day operations, we have not seen significant impact. We believe that it will not jeopardize our competitive advantage of food delivery business. And in fact, these strengths were not built upon exclusive partnership over the past 10 years. Instead, we focused on providing merchants comprehensive value, including high-quality delivery services and holistic digital operation tools and online solutions to improve their business efficiency.

Restaurants choose to work with Meituan as we are a platform that can better understand their pain points, help them digitize and operate their business more effectively and reach a larger, higher-quality consumer base. Also, our deep industry insights, leading on-demand delivery network and experienced on-the-ground BD team will continue to help us solidify our competitive advantages on merchant side.

On rider benefits, as reported by media, the government plans to carry out a pilot program for the occupational injury insurance for flexible employments on the platforms. This joint program by government with the platforms and insurance companies to better tailor to flexible workers, including delivery riders, providing them with better security and insurance is different from the traditional work-related injury insurance.

Our delivery riders are currently covered by commercial insurance for accidents happening during work. In the near term, we will actively cooperate with the government in terms of purchasing employment injury insurance for all the delivery riders on our platforms and to provide adequate safety nets during their employment in accordance with the regulation and guidance issued by the government.

The importance of delivery riders as our business partners cannot be stressed enough. By continuously upgrading our support and services for delivery riders as well as their welfare, we will work towards ensuring that they are satisfied with their jobs and work experiences.

Meanwhile, the social security policy for flexible workers may further evolve in the future. Flexible workers are a relatively nascent form of employment in China and are important across different industries. They also have unique characteristics and social profiles. So we will work towards sufficiently supporting their growth and meeting their emerging needs.

Under the government guidance, we will help to facilitate a better social security system that is more in line with the unique characteristics and needs of delivery riders and other flexible workers in this relatively new form of employment but also to promote the healthy long-term industry development. Thank you.

[Operator]

Our next question is from the line of Eddie Leung of Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

[Eddie Leung, analyst]

I have a question on your food delivery users. We understand that you launched a tiered service fee structure. So could you share with us any initial feedback from your clients and the impact on your thesis? And then along the line, given the regulation environment, how do you think about the long-term monetization rate and unit economics of the food delivery business?

[Shaohui Chen, executive]

Thank you, Eddie. I will take this question. Thank you for paying attention to the fee structure change.

So in the past, so we charge merchants for all the provider service at a fixed rate and the different many other transaction platforms to move different -- from other marketplaces. We provide merchants with also on-demand delivery service for the food delivery transaction, and delivery cost actually takes up a vast majority of our cost of revenue.

All along, the fees collected from merchants are not enough to cover our delivery costs and our operating expenses. In Q1, for example, our food delivery business achieved an operating profit of RMB 0.38 per order. However, our 1P model, for which we organize and provide delivery services, actually has not reached breakeven in the previous years and in this quarter. We have continuously invested in our self-operating on-demand delivery network as we want to serve more small and medium restaurants that do not have their own delivery capacity. And in this way, we can substantially increase the selections available on our platform, bringing more value to consumers while helping more merchants for their business.

This quarter, in order to help merchants better understand the services we provide and our fixed charge, we started to adjust our food delivery fee structure, breaking down platform service fee into technology service fee and delivery service fee. We charge technology service fee as a fixed rate in each city, many for merchant information with client service and the transaction services. We charge delivery fees, which cover delivery rider costs, cost of delivery rider training, management and more using a tiered pricing mechanism, which is calculated based on order value, delivery distance, time of delivery and so on. This adjusted fee structure will gradually be applied to other cities that we have direct operations in China.

After the adjustment, merchants can clearly see the calculation formula for the 2 separate service fees as well as the breakdown for each one. This helps the merchants and consumers better understand our fee structure. This new structure can also help to optimize the operation of the entire food delivery industry and promote a positive structural change for the industry over the long term.

Let me give you an example. Under the previous fee arrangement, merchants will accept long-distance delivery orders with AOV below RMB 30 or even RMB 20 during midnight, which does not make much economic sense for merchants' delivery riders who know our platform. Consumers also need to wait for a longer time. Besides, longer-distance orders for high-quality and -- or reputable restaurant merchants are generally from consumers who value brand, quality and more selection. AOVs for orders from these consumers are generally higher, which leads to a better economics for merchants. As such, we believe this adjustment can promote a more market-driven fee mechanism that better match the supply and demand.

Under the new fee structure, merchants can choose whether to use our delivery service based on their SKU prices and costs and our delivery service fee mechanism. They can also choose the distance and hours during which they would like to use our delivery services. The fee rate will decrease for short-distance orders under the updated fee structure, which provides better support to small to medium merchants as many orders for these merchants are relatively short-distance deliveries and lower AOV overall.

Our fee structure adjustments have limited impact on the blended monetization rate of our food delivery business, rendering our fee structure more transparent. There is no change to our business model. We continue to communicate with merchants, better understand their operational pain point and their feedback and support the digitization of merchant operations and also continue to improve our operating efficiency.

As I mentioned earlier, in the near term, improving monetization is not our focus in food delivery. We plan to continue investing into the industry and into this ecosystem for a more sustainable long-term growth.

Our long-term expectation for food delivery remain the same, and our long-term expectation for monetization rate and unit economics remain unchanged. The main upside for monetization in the long term will come from a lower subsidy ratio and increased monetization rate from both advertising and other value-added services. High economics of scale and our new delivery technology and delivery model will also help to hedge potential impacts on delivery costs from macro environment as well as allow us to further optimize our operational results.

[Operator]

Yes, our next question is from the line of Alex Yao of JPMorgan.

[Alex Yao, analyst]

Congrats on the strong quarter. I have a question on the CGP, community group purchase, business or Meituan Select. Our channel track suggests that the daily volume of community group purchase industry growth rate seems to slow down a bit in Q1. Is this because of the weak seasonality or because of the regulatory environment? And then what do you think of the recent competitive landscape given the platform leader in e-commerce space are entering the space? Would you adjust your investment pace and strategy given the evolving regulatory environment and the intensifying competition in China's community group purchase market?

[Xing Wang, executive]

Thank you, Alex. So in Q1, we further expanded our Meituan Select to more than 2,600 cities and counties and deepening our reach into the rural areas and completing our targets on nationwide coverage. So the first stage is over.

Expansionary results have been solid. Our volume growth and efficiency improvement was temporarily impacted during the Chinese New Year due to seasonality. And during the holidays, group leaders spend time with family and were less willing to run their daily operations. And transactional activity from consumers was also lower as they preloaded their shopping on preholiday.

Demand gradually recovered after the Lantern Festival, and sales volume, well, effectively is up February. And if we look at the whole quarter, our SKU maintained a very positive growth trajectory. We also continued to enhance our capability on the supply chain and fulfillment, including SKU selection and reinforcing our long-term core competencies. Through various measures, our operational efficiency across central and satellite warehouses, the whole fulfillment chain, improved with better unit economics sequentially. In terms of regulation, recent guidelines are actually very positive for the development of the industry as they promote healthy sustainable growth as there are competitions against the industry bigger players from selling below cost and aggressive pricing war. We will strictly abide by the rules and focus on improving our operational efficiency and innovation. We will work harder to build a stronger foundation and core competencies for this business while providing consumers with more high-quality and value-for-money products and better user experience.

And as we said before, we are confident on the long-term growth potential of community e-commerce [indiscernible] the long term. Opportunities like this are very rare and probably come up only once in 5 or 10 years. So it will really help us get into the physical goods e-commerce business and into the broader consumer retail market. That's a business with a TAM over RMB 40 trillion in China. And more importantly, it should create some more value for both consumers and suppliers for the whole value chain. And it will also help create more employment opportunities in the less developed markets compared to some of the key players in community e-commerce.

Historically, we did not have the comparable experience and resources in supply chain and distribution. Now we will continue to build these core competencies for long-term growth and continuously improve our operating efficiency.

We are very committed, and we'll stay patient for long-term results. We will not simply adjust our long-term-oriented strategy or investment pace based on short-term volatility and competitions.

To be more specific, our operation focus in the next few quarters include, first, we'll continue to leverage on our experience and strengths in off-line business development to increase our group leaders' coverage, increasing user growth and enhancing penetration, especially in the rural areas in the next phase. And we will deploy differentiated operational strategies to better motivate the group leaders whether increasing group leader efficiency and better converting user traffic.

And second, we will strengthen our supply chain capability with better relationship with the suppliers and brands and adopt more direct sourcing where relevant. We will focus on SKU optimization and product quality control in order to build a reputable brand for quality and services among the consumers.

And third, we will expand the scale and improve the efficiency and service quality of our warehousing and logistical network. Continuous operation optimization along the procurement chain will not only help us ensure timely delivery and good user experience but also bring a wider range of products value-for-money goods to the less accessible and rural areas. Meanwhile, recognizing that the frozen food delivery is usually more challenging in the summer, we will continue to enhance cold chain capability to ensure consistent service quality.

All in all, our business conviction and strategy for the long-term growth of community e-commerce have not changed, and we will continue to invest wisely into this business, especially around building our long-term competencies while continuously improving our unit economics. Thank you.

[Operator]

Next question is from the line of Thomas Chong of Jefferies.

[Thomas Chong, analyst]

I noticed that your annual transacting users increased meaningfully over the past 2 quarters, especially in Q1. Was this mainly attributable to Meituan Select? Can management break down the contribution of Meituan Select and other main business to the overall new user addition? Do we expect to maintain such a high growth as you have almost completed a geographical expansion? And with current competitive and regulatory dynamics, do we have any internal objective on the user growth?

[Xing Wang, executive]

Thank you, Thomas. And our annual transacting users increased to around 570 million as of end of Q1, a quarterly increase of over 58 million. That's a record high. And we have an increase of close to 100 million net addition over the past 2 quarters.

User transaction frequency growth also accelerated during this period. So indeed, Meituan Select was very effective in helping us to quickly penetrate into lower-tier markets while acquiring a larger number of new users onto our platform.

Meituan Select contributed the half of our new user growth in Q1, not only adding new users but also attracting some repeat users back to our platform. Meituan Select's user quality also continued to rise with higher user retention and transaction frequency, a reflection of our improved supply chain and logistic capabilities.

Comparing to food delivery, Meituan Select have already exhibited better user retention and transaction frequency metrics. Other than Meituan Select, food delivery and other new initiatives also contributed meaningfully to new user addition in Q1.

Food delivery expanded deeper into lower-tier markets and to younger generations, with the majority of new users from lower-tier markets improved to 85% of new users younger than 30 years old. Our other new initiatives continued to widen their scope of products and services provided to users in more consumption scenarios, in line with our overall strategic focus.

In the past, warehousing and logistic infrastructure for physical e-commerce were less developed, especially the rural areas, were insufficient. So now is a good time for us to help build out a more efficient next-day delivery network and to better fulfill e-commerce needs in this market. We hope to bring an ever-increasing array of high-quality and value-for-money products to consumers in traditionally less accessible areas.

And Meituan Select could bring tremendous user growth to our platform and help us reach a wider group of consumers, potentially adding 300 million to 400 million users over the next few years. And we will also expand our product offerings beyond the high-frequency food and grocery categories to more diversified general merchandise while cross-selling other Meituan services to these new users.

Going forward, we will continue to scale up our overall retail efforts, especially Meituan Select, which we believe can help us grow our user base in lower-tier markets. We'll explore new user acquisition channels, both online and offline, on the back of our strong offline BD capabilities.

We are naturally confident of the long-term user growth. We do not want to put out any numbers for the short term as our strategy is always long-term driven. We think priority at this stage is really to build out our foundation and core competencies, strive to bring better services and products to our consumers, which naturally will increase retention, transaction frequency and ARPU. These user metrics will be closely monitored as we expand the business operations and will ultimately lead to an ongoing improvement of our actual operations. We believe that by continuously creating more value for our consumers and improving business efficiency, we will acquire and retain more new consumers with trust. Thank you.

[Operator]

Next question is from the line of Kenneth Fong of Crédit Suisse.

[K. Fong, analyst]

[Foreign Language] Congrats on the strong quarter. I have a question about the in-store business. So the -- what we have seen is the momentum for in-store business was quite impressive this quarter, and we heard the trend continue in the Labor Day holiday. So going forward, how should we think about the future growth for commission as well as advertising revenues? In addition, could you also comment a bit more on the current competitive landscape?

[Xing Wang, executive]

Thank you, Kenny, for your question on in-store. We maintain very confident for our in-store business, and the growth was very much in line with our management team's expectation. We are very pleased to see a triple-digit percentage year-over-year growth in Q1. This reflects the strong recovery in consumer demand.

If we break down the segment by revenue type for the past 2 quarters, commission revenue growth in the in-store segment has been accelerating. We tailor our theme-based marketing and promotional events on different festivals, service categories and merchant types to stimulate rapid GTV and transaction revenue growth. We also continue to fine-tune our growth strategy for our in-store business, including more focus on achieving GTV objectives. Through our transaction-based products, we convert more off-line transactions online and help merchants better understand user behavior and asset ROI on our platform more effectively.

At the same time, advertising revenue has also recovered from the pandemic and achieved healthy growth in Q1. We especially removed some CPT, CPM at loss to leave room for feed on the Dianping app that change -- that impact our advertising revenue in the short term, but we believe it will enhance user experience and user engagement in the long term.

We also lowered the price for subscription-based products to encourage more small and medium merchants to try and use our advertising products. We believe they have the potential to steadily move up to try our CPC ads in the future. Going forward, we will enrich our product types, offering more diverse and optimized transaction-based and advertising products.

As merchants see monetization conversion, they will be encouraged to allocate more marketing budgets to our platform, enabling us to grow our wallet share as a result. We believe that our in-store business will continue to maintain enhanced growth momentum with tremendous long-term upside potential. Even the overall merchant online penetration is still very low for most in-store service categories. Meanwhile, we will accelerate the merchant digitization for a wider range of categories into more lower-tier cities and counties, driving a steady and healthy growth for our in-store business in the long term.

For your questions on competition, well, it's a very large and fast-growing business, so we are not surprised that more and more different platforms get into these. We have also noticed the recent move by short-video platforms coming through local services. However, we are highly confident of our competitive advantages. We will continue to innovate and expand our operations, continue to grow the consumer mindshare as the go-to destination for local services.

We have accumulated nearly 570 million annual transacting users across our platform, if you look at -- look for a whole range of merchant and local services, who are also the more ideal group of consumers desired by merchants. Our consumers could indulge in a wealth of choices with millions of merchants available across different categories on our platform. So this is -- create a virtual network effect by itself: more consumers attracting more merchants, more merchants offering more selections and more selections drive more consumer growth.

We are also continuing to bring more high-quality, premium merchants and launched a series of influential lifestyle guidance for consumers, such as our full range of lifestyle market list, [indiscernible] , and our premium dining list, Black Pearl list, taken [indiscernible] in response to the ongoing consumption upgrade trend. Additionally, our unique content ecosystem provides more than 10 billion authentic user reviews and, more importantly, real-time, up-to-date and trustworthy information on merchant operations to help consumers make more informed decisions. The transaction-based products also offer consumers with more desired promotion and discounting to encourage more spending.

For our merchant side, through multiple products, we also help merchants to better address their marketing and operational needs. Our leading LBS algorithm also actually make potential consumers to merchants and provide merchants with high-quality user traffic. We are also planning to tailor more products to merchants to help them reach their ideal user base and convert traffic into transactions.

On the other hand, we also understand that we need to accelerate content innovation, especially to better capture the mind share of younger generation. There's still lots of room to improve. We will diversify our content ecosystem, explore new content formats to adapt to younger generation and improve content quality to solidify our long-term competitive edge.

Thank you.

[Operator]

Our next question is from the line of Jerry Liu of UBS.

[Yuan Liu, analyst]

Okay. Okay. Yes, maybe let me ask a question on the biggest business we have not touched on yet, which would be your hotels. And here, same thing. If I look at the Labor Day holidays, I would think the demand also was a lot stronger. And secondarily, I noticed some of the organizational changes that we made in the business. So the question is, could you share a little bit more on the updated strategy here and investments you plan to make in the hotel business, including around the high-end hotels? I noticed we talked about 5 stars this time. And previously probably, it was a bit more focused on the 4 stars. Okay.

[Xing Wang, executive]

Thank you, Jerry, for the question on hotel. Yes, the demand for hotel booking continued to recover, and our structural advantage and strategic focus in the domestic market and in localized accommodation scenarios enabled us to recover more rapidly here in this area. As a result, the number of room nights reached record high and surpassed 4 million during the Labor Day holiday this year.

Recently, we streamlined our operational structure and appointed Mr. Zhang Chuan to lead hotel & travel business. Mr. Zhang Chuan has been and will continue to be in charge of the entire in-store, hotel & travel segment. He's also a member of our senior management team. We expect this change to be smooth and swift.

Since day 1 we founded the hotel & travel business unit, we have established a comprehensive suite of talent over the past years. And we do not expect any significant switch in terms of business operation or strategy post the restructuring. Moreover, having Mr. Zhang Chuan as the business leader will bring integrated resources that can further enhance the synergies between hotel & travel and the in-store business.

Mr. [ Guo Qing ], the former Head of our Hotel & Travel business, will become our Head of Bike and Moped-sharing business and will be committed to building the long-term competitive advantage of that business going forward.

So overall, our business strategy for hotel remain unchanged. We always view hotel business as part of our overall platform and the growth -- also part of the overall growth of our platform.

In this quarter, we further solidify our advantage in lower-tier cities and low-star markets as we believe that lower-tier cities still have tremendous room to grow and much potential of online penetration. Going forward, in lower-tier cities, we will continue to leverage our platform capabilities as well as brand awareness among consumers and enhance offline traffic conversion to further expand user base and accelerate the online penetration of the industry. We are very confident that we will remain clear leader in these lower-tier cities hotel booking channel.

With regard to the high-star hotels, we also continue to enhance our competitive advantage. We are glad to see that we have made important progress in the high-star domain during the first quarter, thanks to our augmented investments and the improvements in supply management, customer service and the user experience. As a result, we achieved stellar room night growth for the quarter with 2-year CAGR exceeding 70% for high-star hotels compared to the same period in 2019. Quarterly room night CAGR for 5-star hotels even surpassed 130%. Quarterly number of newly onboarded high-star [ POIs ] increased over 35% year-over-year, allowing us to expand supply to meet the demand from consumers. In addition, we are fully aware that for the consumers who stay in 5-star hotels, user experience and service quality is essential. So we stepped up our investment in customer service for 5-star. And thus, sequentially, customers' satisfaction rate improved month-over-month.

In the long run, we will continue to focus on the high-star domain. We have confidence that room night contribution from high-star hotels will continue to rise following our continuous endeavors in the -- enhancing our overall ADR and the margin upside for the hotel business. Thank you.

[Operator]

Our last question is from the line of Natalie Wu of Haitong International.

[Yue Wu, analyst]

Congratulations on a very solid quarter. My question is regarding your autonomous delivery technology , which is, according to the latest announcement, is the major area that the main proportion of your [indiscernible] financing will be used this year. So that's related to technology. So I was just wondering, can management help us understand more details on your -- on this autonomous delivery technology? And is there any chance that this has -- could be able to be implemented on a large scale and include the [indiscernible] in the business? How should we expect [indiscernible] to that and the time line?

[Xing Wang, executive]

Thank you, Natalie. Finally, a question that's more related to technology. Well, we all know autonomous delivery is a very critical area of focus and very important for us as we explore and research into cutting-edge technology. Over the past few years, we have been actively inventing and designing both autonomous delivery cars and and delivery drones, and we think these 2 mobility options could be further integrated in our existing on-demand delivery network that will enable us to further optimize our delivery efficiency vision. I'm very pleased to see that we have an industry-leading research capability in this field in China. And we will continue to [ investigate ] it for its further commercialization.

So in terms of business application, we think autonomous delivery technology will supplement our delivery riders and can effectively improve the overall efficiency in future.

And there are a few main stages of the current delivery process for each delivery. First, you pick up at the restaurant, then you travel on the open roads and navigate and deliver into the destination that's usually a compound.

So the stage that we think autonomous delivery could help the most is the second one, traveling on the open road before going into the delivery destination as it's relatively standard and open, well paved and regulated. It takes the longest proportion of app and time. We think the delivery -- or the pickup and -- before reaching destination on open road could be completed with level 4 autonomous vehicles in the future. As for delivery to end consumer in their buildings or on their compounds, I think that the use of other type of robots will also be helpful in the future. We are looking at our research and development in application of that as well.

And overall, the autonomous -- the industry is still in a nascent stage and, until very recently, is still mostly R&D stage. We have been doing this for years, and we have achieved the [ milestones ] in terms of commercialization. For example, during the pandemic last year in Beijing City district, we started using autonomous delivery vehicle for a meaningful number of on-demand delivery orders, and we have continued to do so since then. As of last month, we have expanded such delivery service from pilot testing to over 20 communities in that area, delivering over 30,000 orders in aggregate. And this year, we plan to roll out more autonomous delivery vehicles and increase our coverage in some areas in Beijing. And we could also potentially launch in another city as we refine our technology and operations.

And we all know in the past 12 years a lot of companies have been doing R&D in this area, and billions and billions of dollars have been coursed into R&D. And lot of talents joined this area, and some left recently. Overall, I think we are in a very good position to put this into commercialization because we have the largest on-demand delivery network in China or in the world as well as the real user base. We have been doing R&D in this for years but are relatively quiet.

I think we are going to be -- I don't know when it would possible to do a really large scale, and I think now we have had a very good start and I think we have the resources and the commitment to keep rating and to keep expanding the use case.

But safety is our top priority in the autonomous delivery service. And we are also very actively -- and regularly, we have dialogue with the regulators on such matters to ensure we have the best practices. We will grow such application in certain consumption scenario and hope to really scale up commercialization in future.

I believe in future, this technology will help us [indiscernible] larger number of [indiscernible] market-based orders as we continue to grow our user base. And after all, when we are beginning to reach the goal of 100 million orders per day by 2025, so we will need to have a better scenarios to achieve that. And this technology will also structurally improve our efficiency and lower the cost per order, and we can improve in our unit economics in the long run. So the better the technology, and the lower the costs. And the lower the price, the bigger the scale. So I think that will be a very virtuous cycle. So I think that's the future. We don't know exactly when. Again, we are very patient in this. So we look into the long term. And that's all. Thank you.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question-and-answer session. Now I'd like to hand the conference back to Ms. Scarlett Xu. Please go ahead.

[Scarlett Xu, executive]

Okay. Thank you, everyone, for joining our call. We look forward to speaking with you next quarter. Thank you.

[Xing Wang, executive]

Well, thank you, everyone.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect.