Delivery company Meituan will soon have its own mapping service
Introducing maps will put Meituan in direct competition with tech giants Alibaba and Baidu
Meituan Dianping , a Chinese online food delivery-to-ticketing firm, has started building a mapping service, aiming to enter an area currently dominated by Alibaba’s AutoNavi and Baidu Maps.
A spokeswoman for Meituan told Reuters the company was working on the project, after it advertised more than a dozen positions on job hunting website Lagou.com on Tuesday for a new service it called “Meituan Maps”. The positions it is looking for range from data mining engineer to machine learning expert.
“We can confirm that Meituan is working on a mapping business,” the spokeswoman said.
Meituan Dianping: Settle all your local needs on one app
Chinese media last month reported that Meituan had hired a former vice-president at peer-to-peer second-hand car trading platform Renrenche, who was previously employed by Baidu Maps, to join the team. Meituan’s spokeswoman confirmed the hiring.
Meituan, a cross between U.S. discounting platform Groupon and online review firm Yelp, is a so-called super app offering many services such as hotel booking, movie ticketing, and listings of local businesses.