On September 24, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) officially released the "Basic Requirements for Food Delivery Platform Service Management (Draft for Comments)" for public consultation. This regulatory initiative directly responds to the intense market competition that has characterized the food delivery industry.

During the summer months, leading e-commerce companies launched what industry observers dubbed the "food delivery three-way battle," flooding the market with various subsidy programs. From substantial discounts to flash sales, consumers enjoyed a period of "eating meals for just a few yuan." This fierce commercial warfare not only represents the intense competition among internet giants in saturated markets but also signals a profound transformation in the food delivery sector's business models and industry ecosystem.

However, as competition intensified, the industry gradually recognized that excessive internal competition holds no value, and disorderly low-price competition ultimately leads to compressed corporate profits and declining service quality. This consensus is now forming across the industry.

Hong Tao, Vice Chairman of the China Consumer Economics Association and Director of the Commercial Economics Research Institute at Beijing Technology and Business University, stated that single-minded low-price competition in the food delivery industry has reached a dead end.

**The Food Delivery Wars: Who Really Benefits?**

Throughout this months-long food delivery battle, the question remains: who truly benefited—chain brands, platforms, consumers, or delivery workers?

Observations reveal that from terminal merchants' perspective, small and medium-sized businesses were not core participants in this food delivery war.

"We only work with one food delivery platform since we can barely handle offline orders during peak hours," explained the owner of a small spicy noodle shop when asked about the delivery wars, pointing to a nearby chain tea shop as the real beneficiary.

The chain tea shop indeed experienced a surge in orders during peak periods, but only during the time when platforms offered substantial subsidies. As subsidies normalized, the explosive order volumes returned to regular levels.

Fu Yifu, Special Researcher at Suzhou Commercial Bank, explained that e-commerce platforms tilt resources and subsidies toward large chain brands when competing for market share, as their scale advantages enable them to withstand "thin profit, high volume" market strategies. Small businesses, with limited scale and capital, struggle to gain platform exposure.

The first half of the year marked the most intense period of food delivery competition. From corporate revenue perspectives, leading enterprises represented by new tea beverage groups showed significant performance improvements. Multiple publicly listed new tea beverage companies reported positive growth for the first half of 2025, with some achieving doubled profits.

From consumers' perspective, while the benefits were attractive, the tactics were numerous. Price wars brought consumers substantial savings, but were these benefits genuinely equivalent to real value?

"I saw an attractive 'spend 34 yuan, save 14 yuan' promotion for a rice noodle shop on a platform and thought it was a great deal. But when I actually visited the store, I discovered the rice noodles only cost 15 yuan," one consumer shared.

Meanwhile, a delivery worker admitted that during the intense competition in May and June, daily orders were overwhelming. Though exhausting, earnings were high. Now, with reduced platform subsidies, order volumes have plummeted, resulting in roughly one-third less daily income.

Fu Yifu notes that subsidy strategies can create consumer habits focused on pursuing low prices. When subsidies decrease, consumers may reduce consumption frequency due to price increases or switch to other low-price platforms, undermining platform user loyalty and order stability.

Overall, while consumers enjoyed short-term low-price benefits, they still need to pay reasonable premiums for food delivery convenience and quality in the long term. Merchants and delivery workers must also find their positioning and development opportunities within the new industry landscape.

**Platform Competition: Who Are the Winners?**

During the food delivery wars, "rising revenue but declining profits" became a common predicament for leading e-commerce platforms.

Second-quarter 2025 performance reports from various platforms show that while food delivery business operating revenues achieved growth, sustained large-scale subsidy investments directly caused varying degrees of decline in operating profits or net profits. No true winners emerged from this market-grabbing battle.

Subsidies, as core competitive tools for platforms, indeed showed significant short-term effectiveness. On one hand, activities like "discount promotions" and "free orders for new users" precisely targeted consumer needs, rapidly activating market vitality and substantially boosting user activity and consumption frequency. On the other hand, the "low-price effect" from subsidies generated cross-scenario spillover value, with coupons not only enhancing user consumption stickiness within platforms but also driving growth in related businesses like retail and entertainment, injecting momentum into the overall consumer market.

However, competition models excessively dependent on subsidies are pushing the food delivery industry toward an unsustainable abyss. The market widely believes that from a cost perspective, continuous subsidies cause platform marketing expenses to skyrocket, creating severe imbalances between input and output while continuously compressing profit margins. From a user perspective, subsidies gradually distort user selection logic, with increasing numbers of users making subsidy strength their primary platform selection criterion. This deeply binds user loyalty to subsidy intensity, creating vicious cycles of "subsidy dependence" where user churn rates surge once subsidy strength weakens.

Yuan Shuai, Deputy Secretary-General of the Zhongguancun Internet of Things Industry Alliance, explained that food delivery wars focus on traffic competition but often neglect service differentiation and technological innovation. Long-term continuation may lead to insufficient industry innovation momentum, trapping the sector in "low-level involution." While leading platforms maintain dominance, they must bear higher customer acquisition and retention costs, potentially transferring pressure through increased merchant commissions or reduced service quality, affecting industry ecosystem health.

Yuan Shuai believes that while aggressive marketing has reshaped market patterns in the short term, long-term success requires balancing "scale expansion" with "sustainable development," avoiding damage to overall industry value through excessive competition.

**Industry Transformation: Where Are the Challenges?**

As regulatory policies continue tightening and industry subsidy fever gradually subsides, the food delivery industry's competitive landscape is undergoing profound transformation. Competition focus has shifted from pure price competition toward service quality improvement and operational efficiency optimization.

Behind this transformation lies intensive regulatory action. On May 13, SAMR led five departments in conducting interviews with food delivery platform companies, sending clear signals about regulating industry competition. On July 18, SAMR again interviewed three leading platform companies, with core requirements focusing on "rational competition."

Notably, relevant regulatory standards continue to be refined. The newly released "Basic Requirements" specifically regulate platform and merchant price promotion behaviors to curb excessive "price war" disorders. For example, it clearly states that price promotion activities on platforms must strictly comply with relevant legal and regulatory requirements, avoiding price fraud behaviors such as low-price luring with high-price settlement, price increases before discounts, false discounts, false pricing, and failure to fulfill price commitments. Platform price promotion activities should have costs borne by the platforms themselves, without requiring merchants or delivery workers to share costs or transferring promotion costs to merchants or delivery workers through bundled promotion tools or temporary service fee increases.

Regarding these transformations, industry insiders have formed widespread consensus: subsidy-dependent food delivery wars cannot be sustained long-term. Under past subsidy models, user stickiness highly depended on discount strength. Once subsidy strength weakened, some users would likely quickly switch to other platforms still offering subsidies or even return to offline consumption. Therefore, under the dual background of stricter policy regulation and subsidy fever subsiding, the food delivery industry's shift from price competition to value-level competition has become an inevitable trend.

Facing this trend, major food delivery platforms have begun actively adjusting strategies, exploring new paths for value competition. In terms of social responsibility, some platforms have taken the lead: paying five social insurances and one housing fund for full-time delivery workers, providing accident insurance and health medical insurance for part-time delivery workers, demonstrating positive social responsibility through protecting delivery worker rights; investing special support funds to assist growth of food delivery specialized merchants, promoting coordinated development throughout the industrial chain.

In service optimization, platforms have focused on creating personalized services to enhance user stickiness and competitiveness.

Yuan Shuai noted that while current food delivery platforms have launched personalized services like customized menus and special delivery requirements, significant room for improvement remains. Future platforms still need to use AI technology to further deepen user profile accuracy, optimize delivery network coverage breadth and efficiency, establish comprehensive merchant empowerment systems, while strengthening user data security protection, truly achieving leaps from "simple feature stacking" to "comprehensive experience upgrades" in personalized services.

Fundamentally, fierce competition in the food delivery industry has long moved beyond the single model of "competing on delivery speed and fighting price wars." For food delivery platforms, this represents both challenges and opportunities. Only by actively fulfilling social responsibilities, focusing on product and service quality, and meeting users' increasingly diverse needs through diversified supply can they maintain firm footing in new competitive landscapes and achieve sustainable industry development.