Meituan Dianping (美團點評), the Chinese food review and delivery giant, is acquiring Mobike Technology Co Ltd (摩拜科技) in a deal that values the three-year-old bike-sharing start-up at about US$3.4 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
Meituan has agreed to buy full control of Mobike, whose chief executive officer would keep operating the business as an independent entity, Meituan said yesterday, without divulging details.
The deal values Mobike’s equity at about US$2.7 billion, and Meituan is to assume about US$700 million in debt, said one of the people, asking not to be identified because the matter is private.
Sixty-five percent of the purchase would be in cash, mostly to Mobike management, and 35 percent would be in stock, so Mobike investors would become Meituan shareholders, the person said.
The acquisition thrusts Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) to the forefront of two key markets in direct opposition to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) — on-demand delivery and bike sharing — and could escalate an ongoing battle between some of the world’s biggest Internet companies.
In bike sharing alone, Alibaba backs Mobike’s main rival Ofo Inc (共享單車), while car-hailing giant Didi Chuxing (滴滴出行), backed by Softbank Group Corp, has begun investing heavily in the same space.
Meituan itself, formed by a merger with Dianping, has grown into a super app, offering everything from group-buying deals and ride hailing to travel packages and payments. With a few taps to navigate its smartphone apps, Chinese customers can order hot meals, groceries, massages, haircuts and manicures at home or in the office.
It is unclear whether all of its management are to remain on board: Mobike cofounder Hu Weiwei (胡瑋煒) yesterday included a link to the Nine Inch Nails song The Beginning of the End in a post on her WeChat (微信) account.
“There’s no ‘ouster’ — from my perspective it’s a new beginning,” she wrote.
Meituan has begun discussions to go public in Hong Kong as soon as this year and is targeting a valuation of at least US$60 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
The company is also considering listing its shares in China if policies allow.
Its primary competitor is Ele.me (餓了麼), a similar provider of local services owned by Alibaba.
Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting, said the deal would help Meituan achieve its goal of producing a super app that caters to a swathe of user needs.
That in turn would help boost usage of online payments, a field dominated by Alibaba-backed Ant Financial Services Group (螞蟻金服) and Tencent’s WeChat.
While the price paid for Mobike might seem high considering the lack of a longer track record, Natkin said China’s Internet market is dominated by players like Tencent and Alibaba who are willing to pay a premium for potential break-out firms.
“It’s not a cheap deal, but it’s a key time in the development of the bike-sharing business to pick a winner and get behind it,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day