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China’s Meituan Dianping to join maps service battle, going up against Alibaba’s AutoNavi and Baidu Maps

  • Chinese media last month reported that Meituan had hired a former vice-president at peer-to-peer second-hand car trading platform Renrenche

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Wang Xing, co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Meituan Dianping, is seen during the the company's global offering press conference at the Island Shangri-La Hotel in Admiralty. Photo: SCMP

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.

Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

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.

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 US 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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