Meituan
Meituan's RMB 337.6B revenue coordinates 10M daily orders through swarm intelligence—stigmergy and positive feedback loops at scale.
Meituan wrapped 2024 with RMB 337.6 billion revenue ($46.2B), commanding 60-70% of China's food delivery market through swarm intelligence at planetary scale. The company processes over 10 million Instashopping orders daily, coordinating 14.5 million merchants and 770 million users in real-time resource allocation. This is stigmergy made corporate: millions of independent delivery drivers receive algorithmic pheromone trails (optimized routes, demand predictions, pricing signals) that create emergent order without central planning. No human coordinates this complexity—the system self-organizes through positive feedback loops where successful routes get reinforced and failing patterns fade.
The company's Q1 2025 international expansion into Brazil ($1B investment), Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong reveals territorial expansion following the Argentine ant playbook: achieve local dominance, then replicate the winning formula in adjacent geographies. KeeTa captured 44% Hong Kong market share within six months by importing Meituan's AI-powered logistics and merchant density advantages. The RMB 100 billion AI investment isn't decoration—it's infrastructure for reducing delivery time variance, which determines whether customers perceive the service as reliable or random. In food delivery, variance kills retention faster than average speed.
Meituan's competitive position demonstrates the insurance hypothesis for biodiversity: the super-app architecture (food delivery, hotel booking, movie tickets, bike sharing) provides response diversity against market shocks. When food delivery margins compress from Ele.me competition, hotel and entertainment revenue stabilizes cash flow. The 18% revenue growth in Q1 2025 despite China's macroeconomic challenges proves functional complementarity: different services respond differently to the same environmental stress. The company's instashopping GMV trajectory—RMB 270B in 2024, projected RMB 350B in 2025—shows network effects compounding: more merchants attract more users, which attracts more delivery drivers, which reduces delivery times, which attracts more users. This is how local delivery becomes infrastructure.