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Delivery company Meituan will soon have its own mapping service

Introducing maps will put Meituan in direct competition with tech giants Alibaba and Baidu

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Meituan is best known for its delivery service, but now it wants to get into mapping. (Picture: Reuters)
This article originally appeared on ABACUS

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.

Meituan is best known for its delivery service, but now it wants to get into mapping. (Picture: Reuters)
Meituan is best known for its delivery service, but now it wants to get into mapping. (Picture: Reuters)

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.

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