15: Chapter 15 A Sudden Arrival at Meituan: The Food Delivery Empire Written on an A4 Sheet

"Beep—"

The call disconnected.

Red Phoenix slumped back into her leather executive chair.

It turned out that from the very beginning, even this step of the game had been within that young man's calculations.

He had bestowed wealth upon her, but he had also prepared a way to cut ties and escape long ago.

This level of planning, seeing ten steps ahead for every step taken, sent a chill down Red Phoenix's spine, which then transformed into absolute admiration.

Meanwhile, in Beijing.

Hearing that decisive "swap" from his phone, Shen Du ended the call and slipped the device into his coat pocket.

The game in Shanghai had been revitalized. After this battle, Red Phoenix had truly become a loyal white glove in his hands.

Shen Du looked up, staring at the towering glass curtain wall before him.

"Let's go."

Taking long strides, he stepped into the Meituan headquarters building.

Zhongguancun, Beijing, Meituan Headquarters.

A closed-door executive meeting that would decide the life or death of the startup officially began, the atmosphere heavy and oppressive.

Around the massive conference table,

Shen Du, who had parachuted in with massive capital and held a thirty percent stake, sat at the head of the table.

For the first half-hour of the meeting, he did not voice any opinions.

He simply clasped his hands, silently listening to the reports from the executives sitting along both sides of the long table.

The conference room was filled with negative buzzwords like "burning money," "poaching," and "falling behind."

As he listened to the executives' arguments, Meituan's current deadlock unfolded in Shen Du's mind:

Currently, Meituan's core categories were tied to high-frequency offline consumer sectors for young people, such as barbecue, hot pot, movie tickets, and KTV.

To seize market share, the platform not only waived transaction fees but even subsidized transactions out of pocket just to acquire user data.

But this was not enough to fend off external competition.

Thousands of group-buying websites, such as Lashou, Nuomi, and Wowotuan, had cropped up in the market.

Lashou, in particular, relied on massive funding rounds to plaster advertisements all over Beijing's buses and subway stations.

They even offered triple salaries and stock options, renting offices directly across the street from Meituan's local branches.

They poached entire teams of ground promotion personnel that Meituan had painstakingly trained.

Meanwhile, the founder, Wang Xing, stubbornly channeled funds into IT backend development and online marketing, resolutely refusing to engage in offline advertising wars.

This lack of external presence created a fatal illusion for both the public and internal employees.

"Meituan has run out of money."

Morale wavered, and panic began to spread.

Heated arguments echoed throughout the conference room.

Sitting at the head of the table, Shen Du understood the situation perfectly.

He knew that these arguments only scratched the surface.

Meituan was currently cornered and being utterly dominated by countless competitors. The root cause lay in the limitations of this era—the year 2010.

As the last regional manager concluded his difficult report, the anxious arguments in the conference room came to an abrupt halt.

The air seemed to freeze for a moment.

Immediately following that,

whether it was the solemn-faced Wang Xing or the sweating marketing director,

the gaze of every executive present shifted in unison.

Dozens of searching and expectant eyes converged on the young figure sitting at the head of the table.

They were waiting.

They were waiting for this largest shareholder, who had parachuted in with massive capital, to set the tone for this tense, life-and-death struggle.

Sitting slightly behind Shen Du, Xu Hao's grip on his notebook tightened suddenly, his palms slick with sweat.

On the flight to Beijing, he had thoroughly prepared himself mentally.

But at this very moment,

facing the collective aura of a room full of business tycoons, this college student who had yet to leave his ivory tower was still thoroughly overwhelmed by the sheer gravity of the situation.

His breathing became cautious and shallow, his back stiffening.

Yet, Shen Du, who was the focus of everyone's attention, did not even blink.

Facing the collective gaze of the room, not a single trace of discomfort or awkwardness showed on his young face.

The experience from his past life made him completely immune to the pressure of such scenes.

He calmly swept his gaze across the room.

His commanding presence, which treated a multi-billion-dollar business war as if it were child's play, instantly dominated the executives in the room.

Amid the silence, Shen Du raised his right hand.

His well-defined fingers bent slightly as he tapped twice, unhurriedly, on the solid wood conference table.

*Tap, tap.*

The two crisp taps were not loud,

yet they struck a chord in everyone's heart, shattering the frozen atmosphere in the conference room.

As everyone's eyes twitched with the sound, Shen Du casually picked up a black sign pen from the table.

He did not bother to comment on the chaotic arguments from earlier. Instead, he looked directly at Wang Xing across from him and said in a calm tone,

"The capital has just been injected. Counting this money, Meituan's current valuation is roughly around one hundred and twenty million USD."

The moment Shen Du spoke, he stabilized the room by laying down a clear capital foundation.

Then, shifting his tone, he got straight to the heart of the matter:

"You all had quite a lively debate just now, but you're only seeing the surface.

Meituan's current passive situation is not because our underlying business model is flawed."

Shen Du leaned forward slightly, his gaze sweeping across both sides of the long table.

"It is because you simply haven't found any new ways to generate profit."

Hearing this, several core executives froze, and even Wang Xing's brow furrowed a bit tighter.

They had assumed this major investor would authorize spending money on offline advertising campaigns,

or poaching talent with high salaries. They never expected him to completely dismiss the current battlefield.

"The entry barrier for the current group-buying market is too low, making it incredibly easy to copy. It's nothing but a quagmire with zero barriers to entry."

Shen Du spun the pen in his hand half a circle on the table, laying out his strategy to break the deadlock:

"Therefore, Meituan doesn't need to engage in a bloody war of attrition with those thousands of identical competitors out there.

What we must do is leap out of this dimension entirely and shift our strategy ahead of schedule."

Without giving Wang Xing or any of the executives present a chance to ask questions,

the moment the words left his mouth,

Shen Du looked down, uncapped his pen, pulled several blank sheets of A4 paper toward him, and began to write furiously.

The massive conference room fell silent once more, with only the rustling sound of the pen gliding across the paper echoing in the air.

Dozens of eyes stared intently at the young man's movements at the head of the table.

On the paper, several highly forward-looking core sectors were rapidly outlined:

First, build a solid underlying moat by establishing a heavy-asset intra-city delivery network.

Abandon the mindless subsidy wars on "asset-light in-store consumption" and take the lead in first-tier cities by launching offline community door-to-door delivery services.

This would not only cover food delivery,

but also pre-emptively position core, deeply integrated services such as grocery delivery and rapid delivery of daily necessities.

Second, seize the future gateways of payment and traffic as a pre-emptive defense.

Establish a proprietary closed-loop online payment system and online home-shopping projects ahead of time.

This would nip the risk of being choked by industry giants in the bud.

In 2010, a primitive era when all internet entrepreneurs blindly worshiped "asset-light, high traffic, and selling ad space,"

Shen Du slammed this ultimate blueprint right onto the table of this era.

After filling several pages of A4 paper, Shen Du finally stopped writing.

He allowed no buffer time, nor did he offer any useless words.

He simply raised his hand and slid the pages across the smooth wooden tabletop, pushing them directly in front of Wang Xing.

"The plan outlined here is currently Meituan's only key to breaking this deadlock."

Shen Du's tone was calm, yet it carried an absolute certainty that brooked no argument.

Still bound by the limitations of 2010, Wang Xing took the sheets of A4 paper, which were still warm with fresh ink.

He lowered his head and began to read word by word, line by line.

At first, Wang Xing's eyes held the hope of finding a way out.

But after scanning just the first few lines, his brow began to furrow uncontrollably.

As his eyes moved further down the page, his expression grew increasingly grave.

His confusion, far from being resolved, only snowballed.

Spending their own money to maintain a massive offline delivery team?

Doing this kind of thankless, heavy-asset manual labor?

And even venturing into online payments and a closed-loop online shopping ecosystem?

At a juncture where the entire industry was frantically chasing "asset-light models and quick cash,"

every single word Shen Du had written on the paper was subverting the core logic of internet entrepreneurs of this era.

The further Wang Xing read, the deeper his brow furrowed, and the more unorthodox he found the plan to be.

He fell into deep confusion,

completely unable to comprehend what kind of business empire this major shareholder was building in his mind.