There are three major events in Meituan’s development history that constitute a turning point: in 2015, it joined Tencent to obtain four first-level traffic entrances, and merged with Dianping.com to obtain tickets to the finals with "Ele.me", forming the core catering takeaway business; in 2016, it acquired Qiandaibao and obtained a third-party payment license; in 2018, it acquired Mobike and established a travel business module.

Meituan’s in-store business covers four sub-business units: in-store catering, in-store comprehensive, hotel reservations and travel services, covering more than 200 categories. This unit is also its cash cow product. In 2019, the transaction volume was 222.1 billion yuan, the realization rate was 10.0%, and the business income was 22.3 billion yuan. Although it only accounted for 23% of the revenue scale, the gross profit margin was 89%.

In 2020, the revenue was 21.2 billion yuan and the operating profit was 8.18 billion yuan.

Meituan established the "Preferred Business Department" in 2020. Preferred has covered 305 provincial capitals and prefecture-level cities, and county-level cities cover more than 90% of more than 2,000 cities and counties, in order to sink to acquire new users.

Community group buying is a product line that Meituan focuses on, and Pinduoduo is also betting in this direction. Pinduoduo has excellent resource endowments and advantages in traffic and supply chain. In March 2021, Pinduoduo's main site had a DAU of 287 million and an MAU of 524 million, while Meituan's main site had a DAU of 73 million and an MAU of 315 million. Meituan is strong in organizational management capabilities and has the ability to carry out refined operations and rapid iterations in all links.

Meituan's competitors in food delivery and group buying are Ele.me and Pinduoduo, and in the travel business are Ctrip and Fliggy. It officially announced that its global benchmark company is Amazon. Similar companies around the world include Uber Eats and Grubhub for food delivery, and Expedia for hotels and air tickets.