During the 2026 Annual General Meeting, MEITUAN founder and CEO Wang Xing delivered a candid address to shareholders, acknowledging the company's recent challenges and outlining a path forward.

Wang Xing began by taking responsibility for the prolonged underperformance of the company's stock price. He attributed part of the difficulty to an extended period of irrational subsidy competition within the industry, which consumed significant resources and negatively impacted profitability and market expectations.

The company's strategy to improve will focus on two main tracks. First, internally, it will deepen its core operations, repair its unit economic model, and work to control losses while enhancing profitability. Second, externally, it will advocate for a return to rational development in the local services industry, arguing that a model reliant solely on heavy subsidies is unsustainable and detrimental to all platform participants.

Addressing market concerns, Wang Xing clarified his personal shareholding stance. He stated he has never sold a single share of MEITUAN since its 2010 founding and has no current plans to reduce his holdings. He explained that his 2021 donation of a 10% stake to a charitable foundation was an irrevocable philanthropic commitment, with any subsequent sales by the foundation solely funding charitable projects.

To bolster market confidence, management announced accompanying measures. The company plans to initiate a share repurchase program, with the CFO stating the current market valuation severely underestimates MEITUAN's true business value. Additionally, the company will monetize its external investments, such as stakes in Li Auto and other firms, to generate capital for reinvestment into its main business and shareholder returns.

Reflecting on the past five years, Wang Xing expressed two clear regrets. The first was entering overseas markets too late, missing the rapid growth window for international food delivery and instant retail. The second was flaws in the early integrated retail model, which led to a price-war trap that consumed resources without yielding stable profits. The new approach involves deep supply chain cultivation, exemplified by the "Happy Monkey" initiative focusing on extreme cost-effectiveness and standardized supply chains.

He noted that irrational subsidy wars are now cooling, with the market and new regulations guiding the industry back to competition based on service, supply chain, and digital capabilities.

Long-term, Wang Xing remains bullish on the vast potential of China's dining and instant retail markets. He emphasized that AI and the digitization of the physical world will continue to expand the industry's growth ceiling, and MEITUAN will increase its investment in related technologies to maintain its core advantages in local service fulfillment and offline digitization.

In a separate internal strategy meeting for 2026, Wang Xing outlined three core focuses: internationalization, AI, and organizational culture reform.

Regarding internationalization, the strategy is focused and disciplined. Resources will be concentrated solely on instant retail overseas. While markets like the Middle East and Brazil are key, the company will abandon copying its domestic playbook, instead prioritizing small-scale pilots to establish profitable unit economics before any expansion, avoiding blanket cash-burning strategies.

On AI, Wang Xing described it as a transformative force far exceeding the internet and mobile internet eras. While AI agents pose a significant challenge to MEITUAN's core transaction and fulfillment processes, the company's unique moat lies in its decade-long accumulation of digitized offline world data—information on inventory, rider locations, and delivery costs that AI models cannot automatically acquire. The company will channel R&D into AI for rider dispatch, merchant tools, and consumer decision systems to leverage this data advantage.

For organizational culture, reforms aim to reduce hierarchy and bureaucracy. This includes changing internal forms of address, decentralizing decision-making to frontline business units, and maintaining a long-term focus that balances short-term profits with sustained technological investment.

The overall 2026 strategy for MEITUAN is to contract from irrational domestic competition and repair profitability, focus overseas expansion on instant retail with a model-first approach, fully commit to offline-digital AI, and reform organizational culture to nimbly navigate long-term industry changes.