With the merging of Meituan and Dazhongdianping, China's O2O market will see tougher competition. (Photo : Getty Images)
Meituan & Dazhongdianping has recently announced it has completed its first round of online-to-offline (O2O) fundraising campaign, gathering over $3.3 billion--the world's largest.
According to one of the company's CEOs, Wang Xing, the "financing support will encourage [them] to explore the untapped consumption potential of Chinese consumers more and offer a better, more convenient user experience."
Meituan & Dazhongdianping is a new firm composed of the group-buying online portal meituan.com and review service provider dazhongdianping.com.
Wang, who formerly helmed Meituan, and Dianping's Zhang Tao will be the firm's chief executives.
The company is worth over $18 billion, according to a report by the Xinhua News Agency.
Official data shows the increasing importance of the service sector in China's economic growth. The report, released on Tuesday, said that the sector currently accounts for more than half of the country's GDP for the first time.
In 2015, end-user consumption, which includes resident and government spending, held a 66.4-percent share in the national GDP growth. The figure is a 15.4-percentage-point increase from the 2014 statistic, the report said.
Since the Chinese government showed heightened support to the sector, the O2O market has been steadily gaining steam. Previously, officials have emphasized that they are stepping up their efforts to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.
Additionally, authorities have recognized the significant role played by daily consumption e-commerce platforms in providing new supplies.
Wang added that with this boost, firms like Meituan & Dazhongdianping can think of more strategies to cater to the growing demands of the market.
The newly formed e-commerce platform offers Chinese consumers an array of O2O services, including takeaway and movie tickets.
Meituan & Dazhongdianping was able to pull off a total of 10 million daily orders last year. Their annual transactions also exceeded 170 billion yuan.
The firm is backed separately by rival e-commerce giants, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings.
Analysts see a tough competition in the O2O sector as China's top Internet search engine, Baidu Inc., earlier announced its plans to invest $3.2 billion in the sector for the next three years.
