Ele.me

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Ele.me is a platform that offers online food delivery service. It was founded in 2008 by Mark Zhang and Jack Kang in Minhang Campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Video Ele.me

History

Ele.me (roughly means "Hungry now?") is a professional online-to-offline (O2O) catering and food delivery platform in China. It was founded by Mark Zhang and Jack Kang in Minhang Campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2008 and now is developed and operated by Lazhasi Network Technology (Shanghai) Co., LTD. By the end of December in 2016, Ele.me has covered more than 2000 cities in China, with more than 1.3 million joining shops, 15 thousand staff and more than nine million daily order. Also, over three million riders have registered Fengniao Delivery (the sub-service of Ele.me). With "Make Everything (in) 30min" as the mission, Ele.me "applies innovative technologies and creates a world-leading local living platform to provide the customers with pure at-home experiences". This platform not only takes 700 million citizens into a "30min-convenient life", but also offers the franchisees integrate operational solutions to promote the digitalization of the catering and retail industry.

On 27 January 2015, Ele.me finished its Series E financing with $350 million invested by CITIC PE, Tencent Holdings, JD.com (Joybuy), Hongshan Capital (Sequoia Capital) and Dianping.com.

On 28 August 2015, Ele.me announced the completion of its Series F financing with $630 million. The investment was led by CITIC PE and Hualian Group, followed by new investors like China Media Capital (CMC), Gopher Asset as well as the original investors including Tencent Holdings, JD.com (Joybuy) and Hongshan Capital (Sequoia Capital).

On 24 November 2015, Ele.me got the strategic investment of Didi Chuxing.

On 17 December 2015, Alibaba Group invested $1.25 billion to Ele.me.

On 1 March 2017, Ele.me announced that they will launch "Food Security Service" App. Restaurants that are suspected of violating the law will be synced to the supervision department, and this function now covers all the restaurants in Shanghai.

On 8 March 2017, Ele.me announced that 5,257 restaurants were found to violate the rules and were removed within one week. Additionally, 258 restaurants were removed in Sichuan province.

On 12 September 2016, Ele.me announced the daily trading volume to surpass ¥200 million ($29.2 million). Ele.me's sub-service Fengniao Delivery has managed to reduce the average delivery time of "Zhunshida" (Roughly means "arrive on time") Service to 31 minutes, and the average cost of each order has drawn near to the break-even balance.

The data shows that Ele.me takeaway platform has covered 1,000 cities in China. According to Analysys' (Yiguan) report on the takeaway market in July in, Ele.me occupied 35.5% market share and kept leading the Chinese takeaway market in the second quarter.

Last year, Ele.me focused upon pushing forward the strategies of "full-range food supplying and full-time food ordering" and achieved significant results. Except for meals, fresh food, commodity and new ordering peak period like afternoon tea and night snacks have become new growth points.

During the Olympic Games, Ele.me's night snack ordering increased 5.8% MoM (month-on-month), and the growth during the weekends was even more than 12%. 19,740 night snacks were consumed only in Qibao District in Shanghai during the 16-day Olympic Games.

The significant growth in trading volume benefits from the improvement of distribution capability. This June, Ele.me CEO Xuhao Zhang said that the order amount would have 2/3 more possible space in the future and it mainly depended on the distribution capability. In the past few months, the number of riders of Fengniao Delivery has rocketed and is over 1.3 million, which guarantees sufficient delivery power.

In addition, Fengniao improved its distribution efficiency. In September, Fengniao's average delivery time of "Zhunshida" service has shortened 10% and reached 30.88mint compared with that in July, and this is among the top ones in the world. Jia Kang, COO of Ele.me, said that the further goal of Fengniao Delivery was to reduce the time to 30min, which is expected to realise by the end of the year.

Fengniao's daily order volume has exceeded 2.6 million and has become a leading delivery platform in China. According to Analysys's report on China's instant distribution, Fengniao Delivery ranks the first with a 26.7% market share.

Fengniao Delivery has also achieved a significant breakthrough in operation quality. The cost of each order has been close to the break-even balance. With the growth of order volume, marginal cost will decrease further, and Ele.me's complete profit is expectable.

Analysts claimed that since last year, the competition among takeaway delivery platforms deepened into a contest of operation qualities. Being close to complete profit represents Fengniao's advantage in lean operation. The takeaway market now has stepped into "the second half". Richer supplying category and better instant distribution experience will be critical driving powers to increase the number of users. The platform that profits first will be able to gather more resources on segments that are bound up with user experiences, for example, delivery, supply chain and food security.

Union

On 20 April 2017, under the support and guidance of Beijing Food and Drug Administration, major online meal ordering platforms including Ele.me, Meituan Dianping, Baidu Takeaway and Daojia established an online meal ordering platform self-discipline union voluntarily.

The CEOs of the four platforms made a statement and signed the "Self-discipline Convention on Online Takeaway Ordering Platform's Union" together. This convention promised solemnly to the society from 14 aspects including the proprietors' pre-join promise, platform admission, and the improvement of the records management and information publicity of the proprietors. Its specific contents includes: establishing food security institutes and voluntarily publish information to the society on the homepages of the platforms; tightening the regulation of platform admission; submitting the management data and information to the Food and Drug Administration regularly and actively; taking linked supervision and punitive measures among the platforms, and simultaneously removing the restaurants that violate the rules from all the platforms; jointly strengthening the safety training of the riders; paying attention to improve the online advertising and the training of the proprietors; advertising and promoting the "Sunshine Food" project, etc.