Since the concept of the "second half" of the Internet was proposed in July 2016, Meituan has turned its attention to B-side merchants.

On December 13, 2016, Meituan's field sales employees in multiple regions were forced to transfer to the newly established catering ecology business department (internally called the "ERP department") without any prior notice, which shows how much Meituan values ​​2B business.

However, just recently, an internal employee broke the news that since January, Meituan's ERP department has set off a wave of resignations. In a leaked "Catering Ecology North and South Region Group", the number of ERP employees has dropped from more than 2,000 at the beginning of its establishment to more than 1,200, and the number is still declining.

Does such a high turnover rate indicate the failure of Meituan's transformation to 2B business?

Entering the market late, ERP is not easy to sell

Meituan's layout for 2B business began in the second half of 2016.

On August 29, 2016, Meituan Dianping announced the launch of the catering open platform, and announced that well-known domestic ERP mainstream manufacturers such as Canxingjian, Tianzixing, Tiancai Shanglong, Pingxin, Shiweitian Information (dark horse), Zhuoji Dajialai, Wuwei, Keruyun, etc. have all begun to access Meituan Dianping's catering open platform. Meituan's layout is to establish interface standards based on merchant needs, connect with catering software companies based on the standards, and thus open up Meituan Dianping's accumulated business capabilities to these catering software companies. At the same time, it also allows more merchants to use catering software that meets this standard, making merchants more efficient and less costly.

On the surface, this is a good path. But the problem is that most of China's catering service industries are small entities that have not yet reached the level of using ERP. Moreover, long before Meituan, Alibaba and Tencent had entered the dining chair service market since 2013. Various "light ERP" software, including Qishidai, Yunzang, and Weimeng, have been developed on the WeChat side to meet the functions of queuing, user calling, user payment, member incentive system and smart ordering. Taobao's cash register systems such as Laiqiankuai and Erweihuo have more complete functions and are cheaper than the system provided by Meituan.

But Meituan overestimated the market. A Meituan BD revealed on a social platform, "The company's idea was optimistic at the beginning, hoping to transfer the BD who was good at group buying to ERP to show its strength, so it was a one-size-fits-all approach without giving any reason. But after several months of hard work, what is now in front of us is pessimism." It is revealed that most cities' ERP systems cannot even sell 10 per month, and there are even many cities that cannot sell even one.

In fact, in addition to the late entry and the gap between its products and competitors, another difficulty for Meituan in turning to the 2B market is that in order to increase its operating income, Meituan has significantly increased the commission rate for merchants since the end of 2016, causing merchants to suffer. There has even been a collective exodus of the KTV industry and some catering brands. On the one hand, Meituan hopes to increase the commission for merchants, and on the other hand, it hopes that merchants will buy ERP software. It is easy to imagine how difficult it is.

Staff turnover may further hurt the vitality

The poor performance of the ERP system has a direct impact on employees' income. It is revealed that the income of Meituan's ERP promotion employees has generally declined compared with the previous period. Many employees had to choose to resign, and at the same time, Meituan also took the initiative to persuade employees to resign. As a result, the climax of employee resignation mentioned at the beginning of this article appeared.

For Meituan, this large-scale loss of employees is a disaster. Because the ground promotion employees who were transferred to ERP before were generally the best performers in the original group purchase business. Meituan's success in O2O is largely due to the contributions of its employees who promote group purchases. Now, the departure of these employees is a huge loss for Meituan.

On the other hand, the 2B market, which has been slow to open, has also made Meituan's transformation difficult. Since January, Meituan has started to make some new moves in businesses other than 2B, including testing the taxi business in Nanjing and announcing its entry into overseas accommodation, trying to open up some new business markets or tell some "new stories" to capital to increase Meituan's valuation. This also shows from the side that the "second half" of Meituan's 2B is not going smoothly.

This is destined to be bad news for Meituan. It is reported that in a previous financing of US$3.3 billion, Meituan did not hesitate to sign a bet agreement with investors to discuss an IPO within two years, and the valuation must not be less than US$20 billion, otherwise it will have to pay nearly US$4 billion in compensation. At present, there is only one year left before Meituan's promised listing date to investors, but according to media reports such as the Shanghai Securities News, Meituan's valuation has dropped from its peak of US$18 billion to US$12.5 billion, a plunge of about one-third.

To this day, this bet agreement written by the capital curse is hanging in the air, counting down Meituan. In addition, around Meituan, there are many players such as Ele.me and Koubei, which continue to attack Meituan's O2O backyard. The resignation of core employees due to the sluggish ERP business has cast a layer of confusion on Meituan's road to listing.